Thursday December 11, 2014
6:00 a.m.

I’m now the proud and very happy owner of an MSR Whisperlite Universal stove. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I can finally stop fighting with my Trangia X2 multifuel burner – the stove that has made my cooking life a frustrating nightmare for so long.

I had given the Trangia X2 one last chance. I ordered a set of replacement parts online and these parts finally arrived in a box of new camping equipment that a friend of mine had shipped to me from Canada.

I eagerly set to work and replaced all the seals and parts and made sure that everything on the X2 was in perfect working order. Not surprisingly, despite many, many attempts, the stove still would not work. That got me so angry and upset that I went straight to a wonderful camping store in Kuala Lumpur called CoreZone and bought a brand new MSR Whisperlite Universal and an MSR fuel bottle. I was finished with the Trangia X2. It will soon be just a bad memory in my life.

The MSR Whisperlite Universal is a completely different animal from the Trangia X2. A big difference, of course, is that the X2 is meant to sit inside the Trangia base and windscreen. As such, it doesn’t have any legs or supports. You have to have a separate base for it, such as the full Trangia set or the Trangia Triangle. (I would include the Clikstand in that list except that I learned – to my cost – that despite the advertising claims, the Trangia X2 doesn’t fit easily in the Clikstand.) The Whisperlite Universal is a self-contained stove and has its own sturdy legs. You don’t need to buy a stand for it. You do, however, need to purchase a fuel bottle. The box contains the stove, the pump, the three jets, a windscreen, a multi-tool, a gas canister stand, and extra o-rings but no fuel bottle.

The X2 is what I believe is called a “blast” type of stove. It has a very simple design. A jet of vaporized fuel hits the bottom of a very small but thick piece of circular metal. This “flame spreader” is designed to break up this rocket blast of flame and spread it out a bit to heat the bottom of the cooking pot. The stove looks and operates much like a jet engine – a noisy blast of powerful flame roaring upwards.

The Whisperlite Univeral looks much more like a regular kitchen stove in that it produces a broad and friendly ring of quiet blue flame. The vaporized gas doesn’t just hit a metal surface and blast apart. It spreads out much farther and is channeled through an intricate set of metal baffles. The result is a very quiet and gentle wide ring of flame, as opposed to the X2’s central and noisy rocket blast.

The priming and fuel preheating process is also completely different. Here, too, the X2 has a very simple design. The priming fuel pools directly around the jet. You light it and the flames heat up the jet and the metal surrounding the jet. That’s pretty much it. This simplicity sounds great as long as it works. Unfortunately, it doesn’t (in my case anyway), and the X2 stove will simply not stay lit. For whatever reason, the stove just blows itself out and will not maintain a flame. I could speculate on why this happens, but there’s no way I can know for sure. All I know is that my Trangia X2 simply won’t work.

The Whisperlite Universal has a much more complex design. There is a metal cup with a large wick about an inch below the fuel jet. The priming fuel goes into this cup. You can simply open the fuel line and let liquid fuel squirt out of the jet to fill this cup or you can pour fuel directly into it. You just light this fuel and let the flame heat up the stove. Once the stove is hot, you turn on the flow of fuel and the stove starts to burn. The big difference between the two stoves is the fuel line. The fuel line of the X2 runs from the fuel bottle directly to the base of the jet. The fuel line of the Whisperlite Universal is a rollercoaster by comparision. This fuel line goes from the fuel bottle up in a big loop right through the main flame of the stove itself. Then it goes down, crosses itself, turns at a sharp angle just above the priming cup and feeds into the solid metal base holding the fuel jet. The basic idea is that once the stove is up and running, the main flame of the stove heats up the fuel line and vaporizes the fuel on its way to the jet. It’s a completely different engineering and design solution from the X2.

I don’t think there is any cut and dried superiority of one system over the other. There are plenty of stoves out there using the X2’s design that work just fine. MSR itself makes lots of stoves with this “blast” design, and they work just fine and people love them. The simple blast design works and this complex Whisperlite Universal design also works. The problem for me is that the blast design in the X2 didn’t work. THAT stove appears to be faulty and a complete dud.

Both of these stoves are extreme multi-fuel stoves. They can burn nearly anything – white gas, unleaded gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel, kerosene, and even canister gas (butane/propane). Again, the X2 has a much simpler design for this purpose. For one thing, it uses only two jets. One jet is for heavy fuels like kerosene and diesel. The other jet is for ligher fuels like gasoline and canister gas. The Whisperlite Universal has three jets: one for heavy fuels, one for light fuels, and a third and separate jet for canister gas.

The simplicity of the X2 continues to the attachment mechanism on the fuel line. The X2 has only one attachment mechanism and it is fixed permanently onto the end of the fuel line. This solid metal unit screws onto both the pump in the liquid fuel bottle and onto canisters. That’s a clear win for the X2. The Whisperlite Universal uses two removable attachment adapters – one for the pump in liquid fuel bottles and another one for gas canisters. To switch from one fuel source to another requires switching not only the jet but also the attachment mechanism at the end of the fuel line. The Whisperlite Universal’s attachment mechanism for canister gas also appears to be plastic, and I’ve read reports online about the threads on this unit getting stripped very easily. The X2’s attachment mechanism is all metal and very strong.

So the X2 appears to have the upper hand here – it’s both simpler and more durable. However, this would only be true if the thing actually worked – and it doesn’t – not even with canister gas. It’s nice that the X2 doesn’t have a separate jet for canister gas,
But my experience is that it really does need one. The current jet simply doesn’t work. Just as with regular liquid fuel, the X2 blows itself out with canister gas. I can light the stove and it burns fairly well. Then, without warning, it will just go out. The flame will not stay lit and I have to light it over and over and over again while I cook. It is a nightmare and extremely frustrating. The flame of the X2 is so delicate and finicky that you can’t even touch the fuel valve. If you try to adjust the flame in the slightest – reduce or increase the flow of fuel – the flame just goes out.

My experience with the Whisperlite Universal is the exact opposite – perfect, smooth, and 100% awesome. The burner lights instantly, produces a quiet and broad ring of gentle blue flame for cooking and will absolutely NOT go out no matter what. It just burns and keeps burning. I can adjust the flow of fuel as much as I want and the stove responds nicely. I can even turn the flow of fuel off entirely and then turn it back on and the flame will not go out. The difference is night and day. One works beautifully and the other doesn’t work at all.

A huge selling point for the Trangia X2 – and one of the main reasons I bought it – is this ability to use both liquid fuel in a fuel bottle and gas canisters. It’s a good selling point, but it’s useless as a “keeping” point, because it just doesn’t work. Again, I can’t really speculate as to why. The engineering is certainly quite complex and I have no idea how it is intended to work in theory and why it doesn’t work in practice. However, it’s interesting that the Whisperlite Universal (which DOES work) requires a separate jet for canister gas and this jet is completely different from the other jets. In fact, the entire base of the Whisperlite Universal was altered from the original Whisperlite and Whisperlite International to accommodate canister gas. Each type of gas requires a different amount of air flow. As such, the jets are different lengths to allow for more or less air flow. The canister gas jet is much longer than the others, for example, and this covers up much of the air opening around the jet and reduces the amount of possible air flow. I don’t know the specifics, of course, but I’ve read that this reduced air flow is key to the proper functioning of the jet and the stove. The Trangia X2 is not designed to do this. It uses the same jet for canister gas as for liquid fuel. You don’t change the stove at all. It stays exactly the same whether you attach a liquid fuel bottle with a pump or a pre-pressurized gas canister. This simplicity is appealing and an advantage over the Whisperlite Universal – BUT only if it works. And it simply doesn’t.

Before I rave too much about the Whisperlite Universal, I should quickly mention a few things that I DON’T like about it. For one thing, priming it with regular gasoline results in a large amount of soot. There is a broad base directly above the priming cup (essentially a metal dish) and the bottom gets completely covered in a thick layer of black soot. It’s a real mess. I’m hoping to prime this stove using alcohol in the future to avoid this problem. But that requires carrying two separate fuels. The Trangia X2 does not have this problem. Very little soot is produced during the priming process. In any event, there is almost nothing for this soot to stick to. It doesn’t have the wide metal dish of the Whisperlite Universal. It has only the small flame spreader. This does get covered in a bit of soot, but this soot is burned off as you cook with the stove. The X2 (on the rare occasions when it works at all) does not get dirty. The Whisperlite Universal appears to get very dirty.

The Whisperlite Universal is also a bit bulky and awkward. The new metal legs are nice, but they have a lot of jagged metal edges and they stick out a long way from the stove and create a pretty big, awkward device to carry around. The fuel line is also extremely thick and stiff. The fuel line on the X2 by comparison is supple and thin. It wraps around the burner nicely and this makes it easy to pack up and store in a very small space. The fuel line on the Whisperlite Universal is a beast by comparison. It barely bends at all. I suppose this is good from a durability standpoint, but it makes the stove even more bulky and difficult to pack up. The fuel line is so stiff, in fact, that it can lift the stove right off the ground. You have to fiddle around a fair bit when setting up the stove to get it to sit level on the ground. The fuel line lifts the stove up into the air and unbalances it.

The pump also strikes me as rather delicate. I guess I’ve been spoiled by the pump on the Trangia X2. It is a very solid and well-built pump – mainly metal. The Whisperlite Universal pump is all plastic and feels rather flimsy and delicate by comparison. I don’t know if this makes any difference in terms of durability or use, but the X2’s pump is certainly much more pleasing in design and appearance.

This wasn’t meant to be a point-by-point comparison of these two stoves, but I should mention a couple of other differences. The Whisperlite Universal has an ingenious system for keeping the fuel jet clear. It has a shaker jet – a tiny piece of metal with a thin wire on the top. This shaker jet is inside the stove itself. You can hear it rattling around when you move the stove. The idea is that cleaning the jet is as simple as shaking the stove. The shaker jet moves up and down and the little wire clears out the opening on the fuel jet. The Trangia X2 has no such system. Instead, there is a little wire attached to a blade on the stove’s multi-tool. You simply clean out the fuel jet’s opening with this wire manually. This is a far inferior system for many reasons. For one thing, that blade with the little wire gets in the way constantly as you try to use the multi-tool The darn thing flops open and interferes all the time. It’s like trying to use a Swiss Army Knife when all the blades flop open all the time as you use it. PLUS, that wire is delicate. I have been very careful with this tool, but the wire has already snapped off, rendering the tool useless.

Another very strange thing about the Trangia X2 is that it has the interior workings of a simmer mechanism but no way to operate it. That sounds very strange, I know. This goes back to the stove’s origins. There is pretty much no clear information about the specifics, but this Trangia X2 is a modified from of both the Primus Omnifuel and the Primus EKG. I’ve never been able to get a clear answer about exactly how all that works – which parts are from the Omnifuel and which from the EKG – and what modifications were made. The result, however, is a somewhat strange stove. It still has the internal simmer mechanism from the Primus Omnifuel, but they’ve removed the handle on the outside that you use to operate it. So the stove does not allow you to adjust the flame up or down. Yet, it has the internal parts to do this. From a design point of view, this is a nightmare. Essentially, you’ve got all kinds of parts and seals that can malfunction or break and which require maintenance, but these parts have no function. They don’t actually do anything. I can’t shake the feeling that it is this modification that is causing all my problems with this stove. I’ve written to Trangia several times and their replies assure me that this isn’t the case. They insist that the stove itself works fine and they get few if any complaints about it. So, they say, either my stove is defective in some way or the fuel I’m using is at fault or my technique is faulty.

I can now say with some confidence that the fault is not in the fuel. I took the fuel that was in the Trangia X2’s fuel bottle and poured it directly into the fuel bottle of the Whisperlite Universal, and it worked just fine. As for my technique, it seems to work fine for the Whisperlite Universal. I have no problem priming it and lighting it and operating it. So I know how to operate a multi-fuel stove. So is my Trangia X2 defective? It’s possible, but it’s difficult to see how that can be. I know for a fact that the pump and fuel bottle are in working order. I attached it to the Whisperlite Universal, and it worked fine. The pump and bottle maintain pressure properly and the fuel flows just fine. I also know that my Trangia X2 is clean and all the fuel lines are clean and free of obstruction. I’ve gone over the stove dozens of times and cleaned everthing over and over again in my attempts to get it to work. Besides, it’s not exactly complicated. Other than the pump, there are no moving parts. Vaporized fuel squirts out of the jet and it burns. That’s all. It’s pretty simple in essence. There’s nothing wrong with any of the parts that I can see. It just won’t work.

 

 

Tags: Clikstand, Malaysia, MSR, MSR Whisperlite Universal, Primus Omnifuel, Trangia, Trangia X2, Trangia X2 Multifuel Burner