 hi all it seems to me the best way to solve this problem is to find someone who has a "authentic" caldera cone and ask them if the metal is still springy after several uses,if it is all you need to do is to have the metal tested to find out what grade of aluminium it is. 
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> What burner is it d3lphi?
The burner is a simple device that I fashioned from the bottom 1.75" of a narrower ali bottle with a few holes drilled in it to allow air in.
> It may be worth trading speed for efficiency, and go for a burner that will boil 500ml in 7 minutes, but only burn 15ml of fuel.
What sort of stove would you reccommend? I have made several different stove designs, but found this one to be the fastest and therefore created the cone to use it.
> Was it windy when you did the test?
The first test was done inside, so no wind. And the second and slower test was outside outside with a mild wind, but did not seem to cause further damage to the cone.
> A one-piece cone will conduct heat away from hot spots that tend to form below and around the pan, just at the Flissure joint.
In your opinion with this sort of burning or scorching continue each time I use the cone? Do you think my current clone, as is, will survive a 4 day backpacking trip? Or will the burning continue and render the cone un-usable.
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| Edited: 22/03/10 21:49 |
.JPG) d3lphi can't see your photo, but it's a side burner? - too wide a flame pattern for an enclosed cone I think.
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Press Ctrl + F5 to refresh your browser and you should see the pics.
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.JPG) see them now if it's the top burner, it looks a bit wide and fierce for the cone I think. I use either a standard soda can stove - like an ali. trangia burner or, more often, a red bull can chimney stove (picture)- which gives a focussed centre flame and is pretty efficient. pan/stove gap is 25mm(1") in each case I have used a stove like this and a thin foil cone with an AGG 3 cup pan for the equivalent of 20 days backpacking this last year or more, and they are still useable. Though the cone is a little'bendy' now and needs tl, it still functions
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| Edited: 23/03/10 08:30 |
 > In your opinion with this sort of burning or scorching continue each time I use the cone? Yes, I think so. I can't see the situation improving. Judging by your short boil time and high fuel use, I'd say you're running a very hot burner. And it's not using the fuel efficiently, as it shouldn't take that much fuel to boil 414ml of water. For lightweight backpacking, faster isn't necessarily better; a tradeoff between weight of fuel you need to carry and the time it takes to boil water. With a Cone, you don't need a side burner, since the burner doesn't need to support the pan. So you can use a burner with a narrower flame ring to ensure that more of the heat gets to the pan. Like Mole's chimney stove, or an inward-facing trangia-style like I use: Or the Penny Stove, if you don't find it too much of a faff to light (I do: never managed to get one to work as claimed). Not sure if you've seen my article on making simple burners, or the enormous Q&A thread.
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 Of course the answer to melting or softening aluminium foil is to use Ti foil: it laughs in the face of flames...
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| Edited: 23/03/10 13:08 |
 > I have made several different stove designs, ps. nice selection of stoves. I prefer not to use glue, though: see my article.
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thanks guys! Maybe I can get away with making just a new top section and then I can test it using the penny stove. I'm leaving for my trip in 2 days, so not a lot of time to tinker... Thanks CP for those links! Lots of helpful information in there!
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Blast. I hadn't spotted this before, but I've just noticed that you're using the old concept of the Flissure joint, where the two halves look like castellated walls (i.e. up and down parts). This can be seen in the picture above. The new concept for the Flissure joint is that the overlapping sections of the upper and lower halves merely have little V cutouts, and the joint is made by interlacing the fingers, alternating the in and out sections between the upper and lower sections. This results in a much more stable joint, which I hope will be more resistant to 'cheeswiring' too. You can just about see the V notches in these photos. Note the lack of any up/down sections along the joint edges, other than the V notches: I really must try to get a pictorial 'howto' guide written to get over these confusions. The old joint works, but the new joint is better. Oh, and double blast: the picture of the tail I posted earlier shows the old configuration, because it was a quick bodge of the PostScript to show the tail, and eliminate part of the Flissure joint for clarity. Unfortunately, the script still draws the joint by drawing two castellations, and it's down to how this is interpreted... I'll try to re-write the code tonight to draw the joints 'properly'.
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 CP, thanks for this clarifying post. I would have cut it to look like a castle had you not mentioned it! 
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 A new version of the script is available, which allows you to enable the drawing of the upper and lower outlines of the Flissure joint independently, so that you can understand how each half is meant to be cut out. Here's a section of the new template, showing the detail of the upper Flissure section, with the V slots between fingers:
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 > CP, did the conical inner wall make any difference. For what? the burners? Well, a conic iner wall allows you to make an inward-pointing burner jet ring, so that's a fairly major difference. When using it to make a 'normal' burner, it lifts the bottom of the inner wall off the bottom of the can, so the pressure drops prematurely. The parallel-walled burners as on my article seem to work okay, even in red bull size. The conic wall looks pretty, though...
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 Hello folks, I've been reading up on the CONE as it is evolving in this thread. WOW! The pictures and descriptions are great for putting together a FISSURE cone. CP, I'll be contacting you for the latest postscript. I will post pics here as I make one up.....Though I doubt I will be making just one.... Cheers Tom
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 Received CP Many thanks Tom
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 Well, the Caldera Clone thread is two years old today. I never expected it to have such a long life, as it started off as a very quickly-coded script developed from my playing with conic-walled meths burners. The script has been through untold versions, and has seen different joint options come and go, US paper sizes added, all the sheets printed, had the Flissure joint added (and then improved), and the Strata secondary pan option added. It's evolved over hundreds of hours of work into something that creates a very serviceable cooking system. I've supplied scripts to more than 50 people around the world (from OM, BPL, UKC, HammockForums & WhiteBlaze), and exchanged more than 300 emails on the subject, and the thread has had more than 17,000 hits. Happy Birthday, Caldera Clone
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 Also a fair bit of fuel will now be saved and anxiety levels lessened cos you know you have enough fuel left for the trip,and your pot does'nt tip over putting your soup in the grass. Thanks CP
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 Brilliant! Thanks for all your effort, tis much appreciated. 
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Happy Birthday, clone, from the US and Hammockforums.net! It's given me many of enjoyable hours working on refinements. I am still playing around with my designs so that one day I will finally build one out of Ti. Until then, it is AL and lots of stuff in my workshop, lol!
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.JPG) Happy Birthday Still using the original clone Thanks.
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