The McKenzies' Blog…

From the looks of the weather we’ve had it should be a good summer for camping … at least I sure hope so anyhow. Need to get the tent dug out and setup in the garden for to check it for any damage and such .. it’s been put away for 2 years since we last used it .. there was no camping last year.

I’ve been looking at some camp sites and one that has stuck out as looking like a fun place to go (for the kids too) …

River Dart Country Park – http://www.riverdart.co.uk/ Check out the pics of the place on the site.

Also found this place http://www.woodovis.com/cmx/content/view/2/4/ seems all right. Will have to check them out more.

So, while looking for a small and light weight stove for hiking / SOTA whatever I decided to pick up a Hexamine pocket stove and give it a try.  I usually have a Camping Gaz type stove but it’s big, bulky and you need to carry compressed gas cartridges with it.  These themselves are big, bulky and can’t really just be chucked in a bin when they are finished as they are still a risk of exploding.

I’d really like a MSR Whisperlite but they aren’t cheap, however, they are very versatile.. best you read about them on the manufactures website (click the link back there).  At some point I’ll likely get one of these, but not right now. 

For now I’ll have a go with this Hexamine stove.    This the very same one I have picked up for £4.00

To night I decided to do some timing experiments to see how long it takes to boil water in both my crusader cup and a small aluminium kettle.  The Crusader cup took 6m20sec to bring 1L of water to a boil and the Hexamine cube held the boil for 3 minutes.  Might want it to boil longer if you were sterilizing water, but just pop another cube of Hexamine and it would be good for another 9 mins of burn time.  The kettle, which has a lid, only took 4m30sec and the same 9 min burn time on the cube so that means 4m30sec of the water being held at a boil.

A couple of pics and a couple of videos can be seen below.. click to enlarge or see the videos.

Well, now just have to try it out in anger one day in the field

I’ve been working on this project for a few weeks (lack of time).  Basically, I bought a huge 120A/hr battery to go camping with and to use for other things, such as portable amateur radio work.

Well, that’s all well and good, but how do I connect things to it?  I wanted some easy way to connect multiple things to the battery without having to have a number of wires getting attached to the battery.

So, not wanting to spend ARM+LEG and either our first or second born to buy something already made, and it wouldn’t include the cig plugs either.

So, I made this:

Read on if you’d like to see the other pics .. or, you can just go and look at them in my Flickr Gallery

Read the rest of this entry »