Interesting. I like how it elevates the cooking surface. It's a lot less expensive than the Snowpeak versions too.
What abo the possible issue of Aluminium melting?
It is a fairly different design to snowpeak - theirs folds flat, this folds into a quad fold bag - like a chair. But yes, the Snowpeak gear whilst lovely is very very expensive.
It also gives a much larger fire pit. Snow peak is 45x45cm vs the Fireside at 61cmx61cm
It's lighter too at 3.3kg vs 5kg with a fairly large packed size.
RE: Melting - I was a bit worried about this too, and was the main reason why I brought a sample home from Denver before placing the order. I know in the US they do burn a lot more pine than hardwoods, and was worried the coals from hardwood might be the tipping point. As I've seen aluminium jaffle irons melt in campfires and 660degrees is possible.
However, the fire or coals do not directly touch any aluminium component, the fire sits on stainless mesh & the instructions do recommend to keep the coals off of the aluminium edging too. So no bon fires in this firepit. However, it does still allow for a large, but controlled fire.
Even if coals were to touch - because its the outside of the fire - rather than the centre of the coals, the risk is not high.
Notice also on the edges of the aluminium, the edging this is designed to increase the surface area to help in it keeping cool.
In my testing with australian hardwoods, the temps of these aluminium components didnt come anywhere close to the 660 degrees required to melt aluminium.
