Well that's a new one

[Commander Kinsey]

A 1 second powercut managed to crash my soldering iron!

[rbowman]

Soldering iron discussion starts at 3:00. Guaranteed not to crash when the power fails.

[Cursitor Doom]

Run on Windows does it?

[Commander Kinsey]

Now those are soldering irons. Or should I say soddering?!

I prefer mine, I won't set fire to something with it. Heats up in 3 seconds too.

[Commander Kinsey]

You mean Mac.

[rbowman]

Takes all the fun out of it. I had one of those gasoline blowtorches but some low life son of a bitch stole it from the stoop where it was cooling down.

The principle was the same as the Svea 123:

I still have mine. Trying to warm it up with your hands didn't work for sour owl shit when it was cold so I'd pour fuel over it from the fuel bottle and light it off. If you were at a campground with spectators they sometimes became alarmed but I never set a picnic table on fire.

The last few years I've been using a Trangia alcohol stove:

That has the opposite problem. Unless it's dark it's almost impossible to see the flame. It's completely quiet unlike the roar from most of the liquid fuel stoves.

[Commander Kinsey]

Several neighbours were alarmed when me and a friend (about 10 years old) stole my dad's primus stove. It was supposed to run on paraffin. We thought petrol would be ok. It was not. The flame disappeared inside the device, so we ran away. There was an almighty explosion which managed to make three paintings jump of my friend's mother's house wall, even though the primus stove was outside. The primus stove was no longer identifiable as a cooking appliance. I didn't admit this to my father for the next 30 years.

[rbowman]

After translating, I can understand why. I'm not sure I've ever seen Primus. In the outing club the argument was over the Svea and the Optimus 8R. The 8R is discontinued but the Svea lives on so that argument was decided.

[Animal]

I've got old Solon irons that run on leaded windows.

[Commander Kinsey]

Not sure if they still make them, this was something my dad used when camping as a teenager, which would have been 65 years ago.

[Steve Walker]

I don't know if they still do it, but Coleman used to produce a lamp (lighting, not blow) which would run on either their bottled fuel or unleaded petrol - very handy for camping or overnight stays at events, as I usually had a 5l can of petrol in the boot anyway.

I've just had a look and yes, they still do them ... but at £120 - eek!

[rbowman]

I've got an old Coleman 2 burner that isn't dual fuel. According to Amazon a similar dual fuel is 210 USD. Eek is right. Coleman fuel ain't cheap but I don't see a payback in my lifetime. Converting it to propane would be a lot cheaper particularly with the 20# tank adapter.

I've got a 1 burner that I think is dual but I've never burned gasoline in it.

[Commander Kinsey]

I usually have a 5L can of petrol in the boot for starting fires (or when I forget to fill up with fuel). Now that's fun. Me and some friends camping made a great big pile of wood and a few of them were trying to use matches and spinning boy scouts quickly on pieces of wood and so forth to get grass to ignite. I walked off and produced the petrol can. I poured it over the wood pile, then ignited a cigarette lighter a metre away. An enormous bunch of flames appeared and the fire burned wonderfully.

[rbowman]

The tack shop had a barrel stove. Cal was an old school cowboy who looked like the Marlboro Man. His idea of building a fire was throw in some chunks of firewood, about a gallon of diesel, and a match. He never blew up the stove but we had plenty of barrels to make a new one anyway.

[Commander Kinsey]

SPEED AND POWER!!!!!!