Tips for handling gasoline

[r3pl4y]

Hi all,

I'm not sure if this is really the right forum section for my question, but I'll ask it here anyway.

I have made some bad experience with transporting extra gas canisters on a motorbike. A few years ago I was crossing Mongolia with a friend. In Northern China we bought some cheap metal canisters for fuel, IIRC we paid something like 30 RMB (~5USD) for each of them. My friend filled it half, tied it on his bike, and then we started riding through the desert.
A day later he saw that the canister has expanded, so he slowly unscrewed it until at some point the cap just got blown off by the pressure in the canister. At that point we both realized that this could have ended badly if the friction between the cap and the metal canister would have created a spark, because obviously the canister must be then have been full of fumes which created high pressure and made the canister expand.

In the mean time I've read that it is generally a bad idea to fill such canisters half, they should always be empty or full, because otherwise the fuel evaporates and the result will be that the air in the canister gets saturated with ignitable fumes.
On top of that we should probably not have bought the cheapest canister available in China.

For my next trip I'm going to get Rotopax fuel canisters, which I assume are generally better than the ones we had back then.

Besides making sure that they're always either full or empty, is there anything else that I need to pay attention to in order to not blow myself up by accident?

Thanks