pot lifters

GSI make a micro-gripper that comes with their GSI Minimalist Pot. They also sell it separately. It weighed 0.4 oz on my digital scale.

http://www.gsioutdoors.com/activities/pdp/microgripper/ultralight_backpacking/

The Gsi one is very handy.

I used the Mini Trangia pot lifter with the whole Trangia setup on a few short trips.

The operative word is "flimsy", but it (barely) gets the job done.

I would NOT use this on a larger capacity pot.

Emily,

Have you considered changing your cookware? A good titanium pot with handles may weigh much less than the types of cookware you mentioned and you would no longer need the lifts.

Susna

I personally use a lightload towel folded over a few times to pick up my pot. Works great, multi use, and hilariously lightweight.

Edit: that GSI microgripper does look really cool, though. It's quite large, apparently. I suspect that if you were feeling ultralight, you could remove the magnet fairly easily and drop a tenth or three off the total weight. Might be a little silly at that point, though.

I went with the MSR pot lifter because of its size, it allows me to store it inside my 500ml pot. I also read an artical some where, probably here about drilling a hole in the end of one of the handles then adding a some cordage to create a loop that would go around the other handle. Using a cord lock to tighted the cordage so I can use it as handle for my pot/cup.

Someone really should make a pot that can be lifted with one or two titanium hook stakes.

1. If you really need a pot lifter that is lightweight, make a titanium one per Bill Fornshell's instructions.

2. If you simply want to lift the pot on and off the burner, then use a stainless steel wire bail. That requires drilling two holes on the top rim of the pot. I would wager that the wire bail is much lighter than the average pot lifter.

–B.G.–

"2. If you simply want to lift the pot on and off the burner, then use a stainless steel wire bail."

Bob,
I have a couple Ti pots that I want to attach wire bails to. Would Ti rod not be a better option (other than being more expensive)?
Does the stainless steel wire bail conduct enough heat to burn your hand from your experience?

First, choose your pot carefully. If you drill a bad hole into soft metal, you might get a weak spot. I drilled holes into a thin titanium pot, and I made the holes just large enough for thin stainless steel wire. Titanium rod would work, but it would be much heavier. That extra strength would make sense for a very large pot. But then, the extra weight of the large pot would make the attempted weight reduction silly.

As you will find, drilling a hole into titanium is non-trivial. Once you get the hole done, you want to burr the rough edges down so that there won't be any sharp edges to rub on your stainless steel wire.

I've looked high and low for affordable titanium wire. However, I would only need a foot or less of it, and that isn't very practical. Stainless doesn't weight much more. I went with solid stainless, but I suppose that stranded might be OK if the small strands wouldn't be compromised on the titanium edge.

I find the stainless steel wire to be stiff enough that I can bend it and it will stay bent, so I can make it fit. I've never even felt any heat through the wire bail.

–B.G.–

When I wrote " rod" I actually was thinking of wire. So ti wire is slightly lighter but not enough to justify these extra cost.
Makes sense, thank you.

Know a good supplier and what size wire to snag up?

Stainless steel wire is not completely impossible to find. I was given a couple of feet of it by a friend. He had purchased a huge spool of it to be racecar safety wire. I can't find my wire gauge, but I can tell that this is significantly smaller than 22 AWG. I'm guessing it is around 30 AWG. What you want might depend on the size or weight of the cook pot full of water.

You could go with ordinary steel wire. Of course it might rust. As it rusts, you scrape off the rust and that will make it lighter by some milligrams. (I jest)

Actually, a length of steel wire is kind of handy to have in your emergency tool kit if you were a backcountry cross country skier.

I still think that the Bill Fornshell pot gripper is neat. I was going to make one of those, but I couldn't find the correct thickness of sheet titanium that was affordable. I suppose that I could make one out of sheet aluminum, but where is the fun in that?

–B.G.–

Bob,
What do you think about using steel guitar strings for bail handles? I ask because I have tons of them lying around. I use the higher gauge for splicing amsteel and zing it. The lower gauges seem as if they would be more than suitable to carry the amount of weight to hold 1 liter of water (my biggest ti pot). I just wonder how the processes of repeated heating/cooling would affect the steel.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

"steel guitar strings"

I don't think about strings.

Also, there are bicycle spokes.

I don't think that cook pot bail wires are subjected to that much heat since they are so far from the direct flame.

–B.G.–