Soto Muka Stove #4153

Advice on camping stoves

I have a Svea 123 that I purchased in 1972 when I was in college. I used it probably for ten years. It's in my garage today, ready to go inside of a not-really-banged-up-enough Sigg Tourister cook kit.

The last fifteen years I've tried many stoves but always seem to come back to a little Coleman Peak 1, which is similar to the Svea but adds Coleman's well-functioning integrated pump system within the tank. It also isn't fussy about fuel. Any unleaded gasoline always seems to work fine.

We sold the Peak 1 stove for years but last year they apparently became discontinued by the manufacturer. At least that's what I was told by someone here at Aerostich. So I put the Svea 123 into the catalogs to have a similar type for our customers. We don't sell too many stoves, but this is the only one similar to the Peak 1 that I'd ever seen.

At the same time we also added the similarly vintage single burner Optimus, to have a pump-equipped old-school gasoline stove for our customers. Both the Svea and Optimus are now made by the same company, and in Asia somewhere...China, I think. Not in Sweden anymore. But 100% authentic high quality brass and tooling still.

For the last five or six years I've been trying to like the newer kind of stoves with the removable tanks and can't quite get my head and heart around them yet. For a while we sold the MSR version of this type. Whisperlight model, I think. MSR was a pioneer of this kind of stove. I didn't like how the tank connected to the stove so we tried selling a higher-end stove of this removable-tank style from Brunton for a few years. This one also spilled stinky gasoline on my hands also every time I fumbled trying to connect or disconnect it's tank. Which is just what you don't want to happen when you are hungry, tired and about to be handling food.

Now we have the Soto Muka. A few years ago it won a Backpacker magazine award for stoves of this type specifically because it has some kind of new method of connecting the stove to the bottle that doesn't leak gas on your hands. Or rarely. Or is a lot less likely to. A breakthrough.

I haven't tried the Soto Muka yet. I wanted to this past year, but didn't get a chance. I really like being able to siphon gasoline from my bike right into the stove, even though carrying spin-on gas canisters is ultra neat and easy. Gasoline stoves are one more piece of self-containment even though in the real world of USA camping trips this isn't much of a practical factor. It’s only about what's in my head. On my Honda 650 I rigged a quick-disconnect on the fuel line to make the refilling go easier, cleaner and faster. We sell the quick-release fittings to do this, and they work perfectly.

- Mr. Subjective (11-12)