build up on pots used with bush buddy

Try oven cleaner or liquid chaffing fuel.

> I have been primarily using pine woods as fuel. Any ideas on how to remove this stuff from my pot?
Pine resin, charred on. Yuk.
You could try a nasty hydrocarbon solvent – it might work but yukky to breathe.

You could try an LPG torch VERY CAREFULLY. The pine resin builds up because the pot never gets truly hot. No, 100 C is not 'hot'. Take the pot VERY CAREFULLY up to 200 C and a lot of that stuff will char and brush off. Take it too hot (which is very easy to do), and your Ti pot will get slightly (dis)coloured from the heat. But then, no harm is really done by the colour, and the pine char is already pretty horrible. The Ti can take a LOT of heat without damage.

Caution: NO responsibility taken for what YOU do!

I used a stake knife and sand paper. It leaves marks though.
Josh

Ajax/Comet and a kitchen sponge reclaimed nicely my titanium Evernew pot following use with my Bushbuddy.

i use shaklee "at ease". very gentle but works great. of course you have to wait until you get home. although a small container wouldn't weigh all that much…..it's also environmentally safe

Try applying GOO GONE & let it set for an hour.

This stuff is great for pine sap on clothes and may work for your pot.

Eric

Just use a Brillo Pad. Works fine for me when my pot gets sooty.

An old, reliable trick is to soap the pot BEFORE you use it over wood. Just scrub it with a bar of Ivory until you build up a thin layer. Let it soot up on the trip, then wash it off when you get home.

Alternatively, leave the soot on. It marginally increases the efficiency of the heat transfer – like painting the pot flat black.

If you just have to get the pot clean, Brillo pads and elbow grease have always worked for me. Forget oven cleaner – it works by reacting with fat. The soot on the pot is carbon and creosote.

I just smeared the thick automatic dishwashing liquid on mine and waited a few minutes and the black tar came right off.

Sorry for bringing back a dead thread, but I found a solution and wanted to share. Take your pot that is charred with Creosote and place it in a dish with Denatured Alcohol (the stuff you use to run your small alcohol stoves). Wrap a paper towel around your pot and allow the paper towel to "wick" and absorb the liquid up the sides of the pot. Basically your trying to cover the bottom of the pot with liquid as well as the sides, pretty easy and you don't have to waste too much fuel.

I let it sit overnight and when I woke up, it all came of with a sponge and dish-soap without any scrubbing. My pot looks new. I have been reading all the different ways and this is the final solution for me. Now I can go use my DIY Bushbuddy and enjoy life. Creosote is not as bad as I thought it would be.

One of the reasons I hate cooking with wood. When I was young I cooked exclusively with wood fires. I found the best method was to wash the outside of the pot after each meal (when possible) with wet sand. This way you got ahead to the build up and no chemicals were involved. Also try to stay away with wood with a high resin content (even though it has higher BTUs).

Embrace the mark of a well-used piece of gear.

I agree with Ike,
I cook exclusively with wood fires when it's permitted and I find that it's best to just give in to the creosote build up. Save your sanity and don't worry about it IMO (and store your pot in a dedicated stuff sack that you don't care about so you never have to clean the pot's exterior if you don't want to).

Yes, you are adding fractions of an ounce with the creosote, but your pot is also getting more efficient from the improved heat absorption of the black coating. My guess is that sooner or later you are going to come to the conclusion that it's just not worth the effort to keep the outside of your wood fire pot clear of creosote, so I'd recommend just doing yourself a favor and giving in right from the get go ;-)

Embrace the mark of a well-used piece of gear.

Ditto that

But about your pot is also getting more efficient from the improved heat absorption of the black coating

Maybe … maybe not. There's more than one factor that could effect heat transfer at work there. I'm not gonna obsess about that.

Carrying/storing the pot in a silnylon stuff sack keeps all my ti-try pieces together and keeps soot off the other gear. A quick annual scrub with steel wool reduces the buildup.