Owner Review

Primus Alpine Titanium ULT2 3274 Cartridge Stove

www.primus.se

Retail price: $140*
Year of manufacture: 2002

Manufacturer Specifications

Weight (w/o piezo igniter) 3 oz (85 g)
Dimensions (in use): 3.4 x 6 inches (150 x 85 mm)
Heat Output: 3,000 watts/11,000 BTU

Cooking Time (time required to boil 1 L/39 fl oz water): 3 min
Burning Time and Cooking Capacity (w/ 7.9 fl oz/225 g cartridge): 1.4-2.8 hr, 15 L (16 qt) water boiled

Measured Specifications

Weight: (w/o piezo) 2.6 oz (74 g); (w/ piezo) 2.8 oz (79 g)
Dimensions: (in use) 3.5 x 6 inches (90 x 150 mm); (folded closed) 3.5 x 2.5 inches (90 x 65 mm)

Supplied With: Instructions and a plastic storage box.

Tester Information

Tester: Rick Dreher
Email: redbike64(at)hotmail(dot)com
Stats
Male
H: 6 ft (1.83 meters)
W: 175 lbs (79 kg, 12.5 stones)
Age: 50
Location: Northern Calif.
Years backpacking experience: 37
Backpacking skill level: mid to advanced
Style of backpacking: Lightweight

Introduction

This is, of necessity, the story of two stoves: the Primus Alpine Titanium ULT2 3274 and its predecessor, the Primus Titanium ULT 3273.

I owned and used the 3273 for several years. During a 2002 backpacking trip, the piezo igniter failed and I took it to the dealer in hopes of getting the igniter serviced or replaced. They checked with the Primus importer who told them to offer me the new model, free of charge. I took them up on it and that’s how I came to own the model 3274 which is the subject of this test. However, because I have far more experience with the 3273 and because the two share a number of parts, I discuss both in this review.

Overview

The Primus Alpine Titanium 3274 is an extremely light, extremely compact, self-lighting cartridge-fueled backpacking stove. It is also very expensive; I do not know of a more costly or a nicer cartridge stove. As its name implies, the Alpine Titanium is made primarily of this light, tough and heat-resistant metal. As required by function, various other bits are made of steel, brass, aluminum, ceramic, plastic or wood. My impression, backed with several years of experience with the two models, is that all materials are well chosen for their functions while minimizing weight and basically ignoring cost. Even the lovely rosewood knob has a practical side—always remaining cool to the touch and easy to grip, even with cold or gloved fingers. I’ve burnt my fingers more times than I can count on those miserable foldaway wire stove “knobs.”

The 3274 has a three-armed pot support. Each arm is hinged in the middle so that it can fold in half for storage, and they collapse together in line with the control knob to take up the minimum possible space when the stove is stowed. One opens the supports by rotating them from their rest positions around the burner column until they lock into position. Note: this is probably the most significant improvement on the older 3273 model, which didn’t truly lock its pot supports in place. When fully opened the 3274’s supports are evenly spaced roughly 120 degrees from one another. Each unfolded support arm is 3 inches (7.5 cm) long measured from the tip to the burner center, meaning they will support the bottom of a 6-inch (15 cm) diameter pot to the edge. The pot support arms have rounded teeth that, in theory, help prevent a pot from sliding. Because they’re angled slightly upward, the arms only hold a large pot at the tips, meaning the teeth only touch a large pot bottom if it’s off-center. However, these teeth do help to center and hold a smaller pot (less than 6 inches/15 cm in diameter).

The burner head is sloped rather than cylindrical as on the older 3273. It’s made of stainless-steel mesh behind a titanium grill cover. There’s a good-sized spark gap between the piezo igniter tip and the burner, perhaps a quarter inch (6 mm). This gap seems to create a large spark, easing lighting the stove in tough conditions without having to resort to matches or a lighter—a weak point with every self-igniting cartridge stove I’ve ever used. The top of the burner sits half an inch (12 mm) below the pot surface.

It’s easiest to thread the stove onto the cartridge before opening the arms. Once this is done and the stove is leveled, starting it is as simple as opening the valve a slight amount and, once gas is heard to flow, clicking the igniter trigger. Oftentimes, especially in cold weather, in wind and at high altitude, some fiddling with the fuel flow is required to achieve ignition—most commonly the flow has to be turned down to light the stove.

Fuel

The 3274 will fit on any brand of cartridge fuel having a threaded Lindal valve. Such cartridges contain fuel that comprises some blend of these ingredients: butane, isobutane, propane. A treatise on cartridge fuel components and their strengths and weaknesses could fill pages. Very generally speaking, it is best to get fuel with the highest propane fraction possible and to stay with fuel that uses isobutane rather than butane for the balance. Propane performs the best of the three in cold weather, butane the worst. Primus, naturally, recommends against using any brand of cartridges other than their own butane-isobutane-propane 2202 and 2207. I’ve used these, as well as MSR, Snowpeak and Peak1 cartridges with no problem.

Note: Descriptions provided of cartridge alternatives are for informational purposes only. BackpackGearTest recommends that you follow Primus’s recommendation to use Primus brand cartridges with this stove.

Tracking the Changes

The 3273 weighed roughly 4 ounces (110-120 g). It had a four-leg pot support, consisting of two arms that crossed in an “X” configuration when the stove was in use, and folded reasonably flat to form an “I” for storage. The burner was cylinder-shaped with the flame coming out the side. The rosewood-tipped burner control shaft was fairly long and folded in the middle for storage. The rest of the stove—base, valve, burner column and piezo igniter—is the same in both models. In use, the 3273 differed from the new 3274 in several ways:

* The flame pattern was different.
* The pot supports divided the flame into four segments, seeming to make it more wind-resistant.
* The pot supports didn’t lock in place when open, meaning they could partially fold together in use, threatening a falling cookpot.
* The longer burner control shaft kept fingers well away from the flame and would also help support a windscreen.
* The stove took more room to store and would not, for example, fit into a cup or small kettle-style pot.
* The piezo igniter wasn’t held tightly in place and was less effective in starting the stove.

My 3273 piezo failure was probably caused by excess heat melting a plastic piece inside the piezo module. My suspicion is that using a windscreen at least in part caused the problem. The stove itself continued to work flawlessly.

Performance

Like automotive zero to sixty times, there’s an insatiable desire to compare stove boil times: “Let’s crank that baby up and see what she’ll do!”

In practice I’ve found that with certain exceptions, stove boil times are about as useful as minivan zero-to sixty times. They’re of passing interest in comparing similar stoves, but are far less important than efficiency, flame pattern and control and operating ease in difficult conditions. (White gas stoves, because they require priming and warm-up, should be compared for start-to-boil times because some start much more quickly, and using far less priming fuel, than others.)

The Alpine Ti, like every cartridge stove I’ve used, puts out more flame than I can possibly use, especially with a new cartridge. That is to say, with the valve cranked open the flame will completely cover a pot’s bottom and travel far up the sides, especially narrower pots. The only time I need to open the valve wide is when the cartridge is very low on fuel.

The opposite of flamethrower-fast boil times is simmer control. An ideal cooking stove—as compared to a just-boil-water stove—has fine flame control and a broad, gentle flame. You want to be able to apply heat across your pan bottom for browning and sautéing, and for slowly simmering without scorching. Because it’s got a narrow burner, like all its diminutive competition, the 3274 isn’t the best stove available for these finesse tasks. A larger stove with a wider burner will give a broader flame on low. However, this stove will attain and keep a very low setting, although it becomes more erratic as the cartridge runs low. In my experience, aluminum pans brown and simmer better than titanium and especially stainless-steel pans, likely because aluminum is a vastly faster conductor of heat and aluminum pans are made of thicker metal. More than once while cooking after dark, I’ve seen a glowing red image of my stove’s flame pattern in the bottom of an empty titanium pan. Lesson: put the ingredients in the pan first, THEN put it on the stove.

The 3274 is efficient. My best example is a two-man eight-day trip with a total of seven dinners, seven breakfasts and six hot lunches. Dinners were all “cooked,” which is to say that they were all more involved than simply boil-and-soak affairs, some considerably so. Breakfasts were mostly hot cereal and coffee—two cups each. Trail lunches included hot soup and a couple of layover lunches were cooked meals. The stove heated some washwater too. A simple foil windscreen (MSR) was used and the cookpot was a 1.3 L Evernew titanium with lid. A single 15.8 oz (450 g) cartridge supplied this entire trip, which averages out to roughly 2 ounces (55 g) per day. Meals planned by true fuel misers could conceivably halve the fuel used, stretching cartridge life to over two weeks. The empty weight of this big cartridge is 6.5 oz (185g).

Keys to fuel efficiency include using a safe windscreen (one that does not trap heat below the burner head); preferring wide, shallow pots to tall narrow ones; controlling flame output carefully to not waste fuel and keeping the cartridge warm to not burn off the propane too quickly. Careful meal planning and having everything ready and at hand before starting your meal also help a good deal.

Packing Considerations

Short trips are a weight-watchers’ dilemma. Because Primus doesn’t make small cartridges we can either use a partially empty 225 g cartridge or take a 110 g (3.9 oz) cartridge from another maker. Snowpeak and MSR both sell this size; the Snowpeak is the smaller and lighter of the two, weighing 6.6 oz (185 g) when new.

If you sweat the various cartridge weights, you’ll discover as I did that the largest ones are the most efficient, weight-wise (i.e., as the size increases the can weight per ounce of fuel drops). I have three precautions to this approach:

* Especially in colder weather, the propane portion of your fuel blend will be used up first, leaving isobutane and/or butane. This will result in a poorly running stove late in the trip and perhaps not being able to use all the fuel.

* Tall cartridges are less stable, meaning you have to be careful about setting up and using the stove, especially as it empties.

* Especially on a long trip and to areas with no firewood or fires allowed, prudence (or was it Shirley?) dictates taking a spare cartridge in case you use your main one up or its valve fails.

Under certain scenarios, these limitations mean it’s better to take two medium-size cartridges than a single large one.

Field Servicing

I have zero experience servicing either Primus stove in the field. Other than an igniter failure, I can only envision a damaged cartridge o-ring seal, a clogged jet or a burner valve seal failure. Cartridge o-ring seals are available from the Primus importer. My presumption is that one could remove the old o-ring using tweezers, a small screwdriver or small knife blade and great care to not damage the brass threads. A new o-ring should easily slide into place, perhaps lubed with a little soap. No jet cleaner is provided; it is visible and I suppose could be cleaned from the outside using a fine, stiff piece of wire. Spare jets are available from Primus. Getting at the valve seal would require first removing a thin brass 10 mm hexagonal locknut. No wrench is provided for either the jet or the locknut.

Most of my liquid fuel stoves have needed cleaning and maintenance at one time or another, but I’ve never had to service a cartridge stove beyond cleaning off soot and blowing out dust and sand at home.

Some Thoughts on Titanium

Titanium, while not yet an everyday metal, is becoming a lot more common in our lives, especially in the field of recreation. The first bits of the stuff I ever got my hands on were Ti derailleur and brake mount bolts on a racing bicycle I built up nearly twenty years ago. (Cyclists can rightly claim to be the original gram weenies!) From those first exotic bits of hardware, the Ti things on my gear closet have multiplied to the point where I’ve got the stove detailed here, two cameras, several pieces of cookware, a watch, a pair of glasses and a bike frame made of the stuff. While titanium consumer products are usually more expensive than those made of more-common materials, the price differences have plummeted. Should you buy a stove, or any other piece of backpacking gear made of titanium? Not necessarily. Look carefully at the item and decide first, does it make sense for it to be made of titanium, or is there a better material (e.g., a different metal, plastic or carbon fiber)? Second, even if it is better, is the improvement (whether in performance, weight or both) over a similar piece of gear worth the extra price?

This last point is less telling than it used to be. While the law of diminishing returns seldom takes a rest day, my titanium-frame bicycle cost me less than the bike it replaced, an eight-year-old steel-frame bike. That’s progress.

Titanium was once almost exclusively a strategic metal, being used primarily for military purposes. I suspect the largest titanium objects made are still the Soviet submarines with hulls of the dull silvery stuff. The largest Ti object I’ve seen is the YF-12 interceptor in the air museum at Seattle’s Boeing Field. This example isn’t painted black like its SR-71 spyplane brethren so you can get a full appreciation for the seemingly endless sweeping titanium sheets.

Conclusions

The Primus Alpine Titanium 3274 is a brilliant little stove, and may be the best cartridge stove made. The materials and craftsmanship are without peer and in use it is rugged, dependable and miserly. The only cooking chores for which it is not well suited are those better served by a stove having a much larger burner head. It may also be the most expensive cartridge stove made and a hundred-thirty-dollar camp stove is a difficult purchase decision. Since I bought my original 3273 (on closeout) a host of competition has come to market, some as small and light as the 3274 and some even made primarily from titanium. Had circumstances not led me to own this little stove I probably would have selected a cheaper model. But now that I own it I wouldn’t trade it for two copies of any other cartridge stove I’ve used, including competing models from Snowpeak, Markill, MSR, even from Primus. The little Alpine Titanium stove works!

Brief Backpacking Bio, Stove Experience

I’ve used stoves for backpacking since getting my first, an Optimus 8R, many moons ago. My hiking friends though I was nuts and more than a little lazy, but after a couple of trips they allowed as how perhaps campfires were more fun to poke at after dinner than to cook over in the soggy Cascade mountains. I used white gas stoves exclusively for over twenty years but began using cartridge stoves once they were fueled by something better than straight butane. Today I use cartridge stoves exclusively except in winter (cold weather performance and snowmelt duties) and when cooking for larger groups. I prefer cartridge stoves for their small size, low weight and ease of use, especially lighting and flame control. I’ve fiddled with alcohol stoves but I’ve yet to become a convert. I also want to point out that my 8R still works as well as it did the day I bought it (for all of eleven dollars).

I learned camping and hiking in Boy Scouts, tramping the Washington Cascade foothills (lugging canvas pup tents, Trapper Nelson and BSA aluminum-canvas backpacks, kapok sleeping bags and always an axe). From these beginnings I eventually learned backpacking as a singular pursuit and found a home away from home in the Cascades and Olympics.

Today, living in northern California most of my hiking is in the Sierra Nevada, the trips ranging from overnight to weeklong excursions. The last three or four years I've been fairly successful shedding pounds and ounces from my pack for several reasons: traveling easier and farther, freeing myself from as many trappings as I'm comfortable with and extending the duration of my backpacking career. My total pack weight for three-day summer excursions, including food and water, is now roughly 25 pounds (12.5 kg), and a recent eight-day trip starting weight was a bit over 30 (14 kg).

* At the time of this review it appears that Primus has discontinued the stove. Some on-line retailers still list it as available, however.

RTD 5.31.04