Do You Have a Gear Modding “Magnificent Obsession”?

Since the early-1980's, when I got an early variant of the UL bug. I've mod'ed and MYOG'ed shelter, packs, pads, all manner of kitchen gear, and clothes.

My current gear fetish revolves around the current state of the art for heat-exchanger pots, versus what they could be.

My wet dream is a 3-D printed aluminum pot, with a foam-core construction of the vertical walls (aluminum foam, like an aerogel so they are both insulated and stiff without extra mass nor a separate cozy) with multiple layers (not just one) of proper heat fins (great thickness towards the pot) that also function as vortex generators to stir up the hot-gas flow.

I look at nearly everything to see if I can mod it. It's usually to make it lighter, such as eliminating an unnecessary internal pocket on a pack, or sometimes as simple as making a lighter stuff sack than the one the item came with (such as the Thermarest Neo-air). I've removed the handle from an Imusa aluminum mug because it gets too hot to use anyway (unless modded), made room for a cozy, and shaved a little weight. But sometimes it's to add functionality, such as a shoulder pocket for a water bottle or cell phone, which not only adds functionality but frees up space in a smaller pack.

I love to tinker with gear.

David,

That is sooo interesting. A pot with built-in insulation. Just patent the damned idea and then sit back and collect the partial royalties when some company just "has to have it".

Tom,

You have the "obsession too". It's a backpackers "craft thing". We're a bit like women that have crafts they can't quit making.
Only our craft stores are fabric and parts suppliers. "Catalog Friends" as my daughters used to say.

>"patent the idea and then sit back and collect the partial royalties"

People I know with worthwhile patents spend their time in court. I'd rather be on the trail. There's no end of clever ideas out there. I'm happy for someone else to just produce some of the these things. Pots, passive solar heating, cheap water tanks, etc – I give that away for free. For faster, cheaper ways to clean up toxic-waste sites, you'll have to pay my hourly rate.

I recognized this when I completely cut up a brand new pair of hiking pants before I ever wore them. I knew I had a sickness.

I think there is one huge advantage of making your own gear ie, shelter. It forces you to real examine exactly what you are looking for. Even if you end up finding a commercial item to meet that need I believe it is a great process to go through.

Not to the extent of the posters above, but yeah, I tend to tweak things, either by adding on something I see as lacking (like a netting pocket inside a shelter to keep my glasses in at night) or by combining features of different items when doing a MYOG project. Most recently, a shelter that combined features of the SMD Haven and Zpacks Duplex, and before that a poncho-ish garment that started with the Parcho pattern but incorporated some features of Roger Caffin's Mountain Poncho.

I blame this all on my parents :-) Dad would look at a picture of something then go home and ponder a while before going out to his workshop and building it; mom did the same thing with fabric and her sewing machine, not to mention things like buying two skirts on sale and turning them into pants, vest, and matching jacket. I don't have the talent either of them had, but I did inherit the mindset.

Yes, I've been known to be a modder of sorts :)

I want Dave's pot, but I'd never be able to afford it! Aerogel style aluminium insulation! I can't even imagine the cost of that, but it certainly would be the best pot ever made by a long shot. :^)

but you don't want the side walls insulated

hot combustion gases go up the sides of the pot. You want to conduct the heat to the water inside pot.

>"but you don't want the side walls insulated"

If you extract almost all of the heat out of the gases at the bottom of the pot, then, even more than a JetBoil pot, insulation on the sides helps. I propose insulated sides, but a solid Al bottom with multiple banks of much better heat fins.

when you design a heat exchanger, you need thermal conductivy which you can increase with larger area of fins, and you need length of the channel

the distance from the flame, to the edge of the pot is not long enough to extract anywhere near all the heat. If you can increase that distance by going up the sides of the pot you can increase the amount of heat extracted.

It's complicated, just throwing this out there. You got to experiment, which is what you're doing…

Jerry,

What you're saying seems to be what Trail Designs discovered and developed with their Caldera Cone design. The pot normally sits all the way inside the cone, suspended by the pot's top rolled edge in a cone made specifically for that pot diameter. That way the sides of the pot become exposed to a heat source contained by the cone with heat venting at the top of the cone. Deucedly clever.

And that explains the CC's popularity. It first became the darling of alcohol burner fans looking for efficiency and now of ESBIT fans like myself.

I know from experimenting with various ESBIT burner/windscreen combos that my Ti Sidewinder stove & 3 cup pot is absolutely the most efficient ESBIT stove I've found. (And with a BGET style tab holder to contain the fuel fluids I get far longer burn times as well.)