Hello,
The petromax works with kerosene the same way than with gasoline - only the preheating-time is with kerosene longer (about 60-90 seconds instead of 30 seconds with gasoline), but thats all.
The swiss army also used / uses petromax lanterns a long time, and they used / use the gasoline version until today. These lamps do not have a "rapid", they are preheated by alkohol and have a straight carburator. With the swiss army, there is no information about any accidents with these lamps - only the german army guys managed to blow themselves up with gasoline-driven petromaxes.
Just to be complete, it is possible to convert a kerosene-carburator to a normal gasoline one: Just cut of the helix, but let about half an inch reside on the central piece on both sides. Press these ends together, and get them tight by hard-soldering them with a high-temperature brass welding (>700°C melting point) and a blowtorch. After this, widen the inner hole of the carburator a little bit to a diameter of about 5mm, and thats all.
Several poeple here in the forum (incl. myself) did this with the carburator of a 150CP petromax (the smallest one), because for this modell, gasoline carburators were never available.
Some time ago, i did some measurements of the temperature on a running petromax, and the highest value were about 620°C on the helix, the straight part of the carburator reached about 550°C, so if these weldings are made with stuff that melts above 700°C (normal brass weld), it will never get loose. The original helix is also welded with this type of weld.
One question to the end: Is it difficult to get a normal petromax in the US ? Can you buy it in surplus or army shops ?
Here in europe it is e.g. partly difficult to get specific coleman modells, as they were never sold outside the US - the majority of petromax lanterns were in anxcient times sold to eastern europe or india, and some modells are currently re-imported from there, because they dissappeared in europe long time ago (e.g. types 834, 835 hanging lanterns)
Greetings,
Frank.