Trangia

When I'm not writing about knives, guns, fishing, stupid politicians (almost a full-time job there), radio and other stuff, I can be found playing with camp stoves. Yes Virginia, collecting and 'fettling' with camp stoves is a thing, and grown men do it. I mean, why not? It mashes up two of the human male's favorite things - fire and food. Add a bottle of beer and you have the trifecta. I've been 'into' camp stoves since I was a Boy Scout, and that interest was fueled  (ha, ha) by books like Colin Fletcher's classic 'The Complete Walker'. I'm interested in anything that puts out a flame - from classic old Coleman two burner suitcase stoves to the modern ultra-light backpacking stoves manufactured by companies like MSR. 

I've written in this blog a few times about various stoves like the old Swedish self pressurizing brass stoves and single burner military stoves. I took a pause on this interest for a time, but a few years back, while camping with my wife, my interest was renewed. She was taking a nap one afternoon and I was puttering around the campground, and the thought struck me, "This would be a great time to play around with some old stoves". And just that quick, I was back into fettling with stoves ('fettling' is a quaint British term for tinkering around with something to fix it or make it better - a wonderful word that perfectly describes playing around with old camp stoves). 

Several months ago I made a huge mistake - I went down a discussion rabbit hole on the Classic Camp Stoves website (a very dangerous site for those who like to fettle) and learned about something I don't think I'd heard about before - cook sets made by a Swedish company called Trangia. I may have heard about them but never paid much attention because the stove part of the Trangia cook set is a simple (but ingenious) unpressurized alcohol burner. With the Triangia system you don't get a pressurized roaring flame, you get a silent, pokey, alcohol flame. I'd dealt with other alcohol stoves in the past - little more than a cup filled with denatured alcohol and a small pot stand. The performance wasn't impressive. But what Trangia did was interesting. They combined an improved and more efficient alcohol burner with a burner support and wind screen that improves the overall performance of the burner, making it a viable way to heat water and cook small meals. Now, Trangia didn't come up with this in 1980, or even 1960. The Trangia 'storm cooker' set was designed in 1951! This isn't a backpacking stove (although I'm sure more than a few were carried on backpacking trips). It's really more of a car camping or picknick cooking setup. 

The basic storm cooker sets consist of a burner stand and windscreen, two nesting pots, a fry pan and a pot grabber. Every set also includes Triangia's signature brass alcohol burner. Some sets also include a small tea kettle. Everything is made out of stamped aluminum, and Trangia offers sets in bare aluminum, a non-stick coating (like Teflon, but not Teflon), hard anodized aluminum or a unique material called duossal, which stands for 'dual stainless steel and aluminum'. This is basically an aluminum and stainless steel pot bonded together under immense pressure, so the cooking surface is stainless steel, but you get the better heat dissipation of aluminum on the outer shell. 

The plain aluminum cookset. Simple & well thought out

These sets can best be described as 'old world' and 'charming'. They harken back to an era when lunches were put into wicker baskets and loaded into the boot of the old Morris for a day of sightseeing along the ancient country roads of Yorkshire, stopping to eat lunch and brew up some tea and soup in the shelter of an old stone farmhouse while watching the sheepdogs move their charges from one field to the next, and wrapping yourself in a wool shawl as the cold mist settles in for the late afternoon. Yeah, OK, I watch too much Masterpiece Theater.

The storm cooker packs down into a compact nested set. It contains the burner base, 
windscreen/pot support, two bowls, a fry pan/lid, pot grabber and alcohol burner. If you
buy the optional kettle, it fits in there too

Trangia has been in business for almost 100 years The storm cooker sets were not their first product, but clearly they are the most successful. The design of the alcohol burner is clever and it makes the best use of the unpressurized fuel. It can easily boil water or heat a small frying pan in a reasonable amount of time. Not as fast as pressurized gas stove, but still fast enough and, like I mentioned, without all the noise and complexity of a pressurized gas stove. 

About the size of a biscuit. The burner includes a flame adjustment cap - simmer ring (left)
and a storage lid (right)

The alcohol burner set in the burner stand. The stand ensures good airflow to the burner

The windscreen set over the burner stand, which improves efficiency by
forming a chimney that blocks wind and funnels heat to the pot or pan 

Flame on! The alcohol burner in full roar (but there's no roar)

If the alcohol burner has a drawback, it's that it's either all the way on, or all the way off. Since it's not a pressurized system there's no valve to regulate output. You light the alcohol in the burner and it just... burns. There's no way to regulate the flame. Trangia does include a gizmo called a 'simmer ring' which doesn't work all that well. I only use it to extinguish the flame. But Trangia introduced something that I think fully reveals the genius of the system design. You can buy an iso-butane burner head that snaps into the hole that the alcohol burner normally sits in. This burner brings more heat, and adjustable heat, to the the storm cooker set. If  you've ever used a camping or backpacking stove you know that wind is the enemy of any stove. That's why companies like MSR and Optimus include flexible aluminum wind screens with each stove. These windscreens work, but they are a pain to set up. They are little more than heavy duty aluminum foil. The Trangia wind screen/pot stand is the best solution for this problem that I've seen. It's the wind screen/pot stand that makes the simple alcohol burner a viable cooking platform, but when used with the iso-butane burner the storm cooker becomes an incredibly versatile cooking system. You can boil water with a full flame, or simmer a stew with a low flame. Again, the pot stand serves as a chimney that effectively funnels the burner heat straight to the cooking surface. Add a camp oven (like the wonderful Omnia system) and you can even make rolls, biscuits, bread, pies and other baked goods. 

The Trangia 'snap-in' iso-butane burner significantly enhances the storm cooker set, making
it a platform for more complex cooking tasks

An additional trick with the iso-butane burner is the ability to use it with larger 1lb propane cylinders. The burner fuel line is long enough and flexible enough to allow it to connect to an upright 1lb cylinder. You'll have to buy a separate adapter to mate the burner connector to the cylinder, but they are inexpensive and available from several sources on Amazon. This means you have access to cheaper bulk fuel for longer cooking & baking sessions.

Running off of a larger fuel source means you can tackle larger cooking tasks like heating large
pots of water for things like pasta

To say that I'm impressed with the versatility of the Trangia system is an understatement. I own a lot of camp stoves and cookware, but no single integrated cookset matches the capabilities of the Trangia storm cooker. Would I carry it on the Appalacian Trail? No. Would I take it to a campground to handle regular meal prep chores in an old-fashioned, leisurely and non-fussy way? You bet!

Stay sharp!

Two Years On

Goodness gracious, it's been two years since my last post here! OK, I've been busy elsewhere, including blogging over at my ham radio site. This blog got less and less attention as my interests drifted away a bit from guns, knives, fishing and politics. That's just how life goes. But I always knew I'd come back here. Life is cyclical, and I'm starting to circle back to those interests that drove this blog from the beginning. So a few updates...

Let's start with politics. My last post, in 2022, had me grousing about Joe Biden and his imbecilic behavior two years into his term. I NEVER thought we'd be where we are today, at the end of June 2024. I write this just a few days after Biden's disastrous debate performance against... Donald Trump!? In 2022 I thought Donald Trump was done as a viable political candidate and political force. Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley and other Republican stars were on the rise, and nobody thought Trump had a chance in hell of securing another nomination. DeSantis in particular looked like an unstoppable force. Today, however, it not only looks like Trump has the Republican nomination sewn up, but he also has a better than even chance of taking the White House back. By focusing all their attention and venom on Trump, they've made him both a martyr and a hero to a solid and motivated core of Republican voters. Trump skillfully leveraged that to sweep aside all Republican opposition at the state level, locked up the party nomination and, from where we stand in early summer 2024, will lock up the Oval Office in November.

As I approach retirement (scheduled for early 2025), my lovely wife and I are spending more time contemplating the closing chapters of our lives. No, I'm not trying to sound morbid, it's just fact - we have more life behind us than ahead. But we intend to make the absolute best of what's left. That includes more time with the kids and grand kids, more camping & fishing, travel, getting the house sold and moving into a new, smaller and age friendlier place. 

Because we are planning to move, I've dialed way back on knife collecting/accumulation. I no longer actively collect, but I do keep my finger on the pulse of knife activity. It's a passion that will be with me until the end of my days. Sadly, if the 2024 Blade Show in Atlanta was any indication, the knife community is in decline. Oh, there's plenty of blades available, but the innovation and artistry of custom knife making has been stomped all over by fantasy and 'battle blade' makers. It seems these days that anyone with a Harbor Freight grinder can (and does) call themselves a knife maker. There was aisle after aisle lot of poorly thought out and poorly executed crap. The elegance of a beautifully conceived and executed blade was in short supply. I may write more on this later.

I still love to fish, and for over a decade I was exclusively focused on fly fishing. It's a craft that takes time to learn, and I focused on perfecting my cast and presentation, fly tying, approaching various species in differing environments. It was all fun, but I was always annoyed by the pretentiousness of the fly fishing crowd vs. everyone else on the water. You can walk into a fly fishing shop anywhere in the US and smell the distain for the spinning and bait casting guys that's seeped into the walls. Back in early 2023 my wife and I were camping on the shores of West Point Lake in Georgia. While packing for the trip, and I don't know why, I grabbed an old ultralight spinning outfit and a box full of spinners and jigs and tossed them into the camper. The next morning I found myself knee deep in West Point Lake, just a few feet from our camp ground, tagging small bass and bluegill with almost every toss of an old Mepps spinner. It had been years since I had that much simple fun while fishing. 

The difference between fly fishing and spin fishing is this - fly fishing is like having dinner reservations to a 4-star restaurant, getting dressed in your best tuxedo, driving to dinner in your Mercedes S-Class, eating small, delicate bites of entrees that have three figure prices and foreign names, and moving around the dance floor in choreographed routines designed to telegraph your elegance, style and wealth to all the right people. Spin fishing is like driving to a local dive bar in your 10 year old pickup truck, swilling cheap beer right out of the pitcher, drizzling nacho cheese all over your worn out jeans, and getting into a drunken fight with an Alabama fan. Both can be fun ways to approach fishing.

Today when I go fishing there's a fly rod and a spinning rod in the truck. If the fish seem to be hitting things on the surface, I'll use the fly rod. If they are holding deep I'll use spinning gear. Sort of a tuxedo in a dive bar approach. 😁

One thing's for sure - whether it's fly fishing or spin fishing, you can never have too many toys.

Stay sharp!