MSR Spring 2015 Preview

Fresh from MSR at OutDoor and due in the shops in spring 2015 was the new, award-winning, WindBoiler stove which take the brilliant, windproof, radiant burner used for the Reactor mountaineering stove, trims it down and then combines it with a single-pot, JetBoil-style cooking pot complete with transparent lid for easy cooking views.

A lot of people at the show didn’t quite get what makes the WindBoiler different from either a JetBoil or the equivalent Primus Solo. In short, it’s that burner which is both very powerful, but also carries on boiling hard in winds where equivalent stoves simply give up the ghost.

Boils When It Blows

The heat exchanger pot design ups efficiency too, but it’s the burner and its performance in high winds and low temperatures that promises to make it different and explains why it won an award at the show. Here’s MSR’s own claim:

‘The WindBoiler stove boils half a litre of water a full minute faster than the leading competition in a breeze. In a 19-kph (12-mph) wind, it boils in a mere 2:45 minutes, while the competition fails to boil, no matter the amount of fuel used.’

As well as the basic single-pot stove, there are accessories available including the WindBoiler 1.0L Accessory Pot, WindBoiler Coffee Press Kit, and the WindBoiler Hanging Kit.

The basic stove unit is set to sell for £110 in the UK come spring 2014. Could be the ultimate foul-weather backpacking single-pot stove.

New FlyLite Tent

MSR’s other big news was the new minimalist FlyLite tent, a 710g that’s the lightest two-person shelter that MSR has ever made. It is, as you can see, a spacious-looking shelter with vertical walls for maximum usability and a single-skin construction that uses two trekking poles for support.

Fabrics are DuraShield-coated nylon (10D on the walls and 20D on the floor) with taped seams and reinforced stress points and gives, says MSR, ‘twice the performance of normal fabrics’ without adding weight. There are vents on all four aspects of the tent as well to minimise condensation.

In the flesh it looks tall and spacious with room to sit up, throw cats around, retain some personal space and so on. How it’ll cope with fickle UK conditions remains to be seen, but it’s certainly amazingly light for its size and volume. What size and volume? ‘A 2.7 square-meter floor space that result in a spacious 2039 litre interior’ it says here.

More information

The WindBoiler is out in November 2014 with the Flylite following on in January 2015. Details of MSR’s current range of equipment at www.msrgear.com.