No other stove has garnered as much hype in the UL community recently as Evernew's Ti DX. It promises much. Multi-fuel versatility, ultralight and importantly for me, compact enough to sit inside my cooking pot without the need for things like caddies or extra stuff bags. Elegantly manufactured from titanium in Japan the finish is sublime. The whole thing packs down to sit in the bottom half of a typical 700ml pot leaving plenty of space for folding sporks, your choice of fire starters and kindling. It weighs 86g for the upper and lower rings, 'Power Plate' and the Trangia-inspired alcohol burner. In fact you can find all the fine detail on Evernew's website so I can spend more time telling you how it worked...
I've had a chance to use this little stove in two of it's three guises, as a wood burner and as an alcohol stove. It will also burn solid fuel 'Esbit' tabs but they are proving a little hard to come by over here and the two tabs I do have left I'm keeping as emergency fuel back-ups in case I run out of alcohol or can't find any wood dry enough to burn.
I bought the Ti DX to use primarily as a minimalist wood burner and the first time I got to use it was a pleasant, warm, dry, over-nighter, up above the tree-line. There is still a bountiful supply of fuel here but you have to look harder for it. Dry, dead heather stalks and alpine berry stems are hidden below the undergrowth and offer more than enough combustible material and a couple of handfuls will easily bring a 700 pot of water to a boil.
With a single match and a pinch of pocket-dried birch bark as tinder the Ti DX was soon burning nicely. Unlike other wood burning stoves it does need a little more attention as the fire box is small but when time isn't a priority it's actually an enjoyable task, feeding the flames with pencil sized morsels through either of the slots. It pulls air in easily enough through the perforated 'Power Plate' acting as a base and the circular holes around the lower edge. The slightly golden finish of the titanium when new was soon lost to it's working uniform of blued metal and soot but it's a fine looking unit when flickering away with orange flames.
When I took the Ti DX on the Scandinavian UL Bloggers Meet-up in Sweden the unit, in stripped down, wood-only, 52g guise, was up against some difficult, wet conditions and superior wood burners. The gold standard of UL wood burners is currently the highly regarded Bushbuddy and next to a couple of those, with experienced users, the Ti DX struggled to match their performance. It took a lot longer to bring water to a boil, sometimes marked by my friends happily starting their dinner while I was still waiting for water to boil. If you travel alone and time is something best spent enjoying the task of feeding the stove then this is of no consequence but in Sweden we travelled in a group and during short stops in bad weather it's time-consuming action made breaks longer than necessary. The Bushbuddy is, however, heavier and requires a larger, heavier pot for storage, around the 900-1000ml range, something to bear in mind.
The alcohol burner is neatly crafted and resplendent with metric and imperial fuel volume markings. It sits in the lower ring and the 'Power Plate' can be sited on top. I'm not analytical enough to run dozens of tests to ascertain it's fuel consumption scientifically (thankfully people like Dave are) but in use it doesn't appear to be the most miserly of units, using around 35ml of fuel to boil 600ml of water compared to about 26ml of fuel in my Super Cat stove. On a long distance hike, using just alcohol as a fuel source, this could be significant.
So while the Evernew Ti DX has some serious advantages like ultra-low weight, superior compactness and versatility over some of it's rivals it is not without a few niggles. Thirsty in alcohol mode and a little slow and fussy when burning wood it comes down to the individual to decide if the advantages outweigh the minor disadvantages. The answer to our quest for the ultimate do-it-all UL stove? Maybe believe the hype.