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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

Damn, imagine having a titanium shovel! I want one!

They exist! Meant for backpacking/back country work.

I spent a summer as a wilderness search and rescue intern/volunteer/grunt/mule during college and was shocked at how much weight could have been saved with better gear. There’s just a minimal market for it.

That company sells titanium pots, too. And they say “ Titanium leaves no metallic smell or taste.”

I don’t believe it. Titanium is, mechanically, a great material for a lightweight pot, but in my limited testing, I don’t think it’s inert enough. Green tea in a titanium pot is especially nasty.

I had similar experiences with titanium cookware. Could it be acting as a catalyst to something that would otherwise not happen?

I don’t know.

My current favorite cooking surface is the coating used on Hestan Nanobond. It’s sold as “titanium” but, from reading the patent, I think it’s a bunch of layers of CrN, TiN, and AlN, applied by PVD in a process optimized to produce an attractive gray color that looks a bit like metallic titanium. It seems very hard, very durable, and does not obviously react with any kind of food. (And even if it did, unless something oxidized the Cr to +6 and made it soluble, nothing that might leach out seems likely to be harmful.)

The patent seems to expire fairly soon, and maybe the process will take off. I wonder if this coating could be applied to a lightweight titanium pot with good results.

In the backpacking and bicycle-travel community, titanium pots are widely regarded as good only for boiling water in, since they don't distribute heat as well as aluminium for more complex cooking.

I’m well aware, but I don’t really believe this :). As far as I can tell, no very thin pot or pan distributes heat well [0], and no very thin pan cleans up well from cooked-on food when the cleaning supplies at hand while backpacking.

[0] Concretely, this means that, when cooking solid food, the parts of the pan where the food isn’t sinking heat adequately get too hot.

The non-stick aluminium pans from MSR, and perhaps other brands, do clean up well from food after cooking. In my experience (hundreds of nights of cooking while cycling the world), it is enough to wipe them clean with a dedicated towel or wet-wipe in order to pack them, and then they can be washed completely the next time one reaches a convenient water source.

This is actually a plot point in H. Beam Piper's _Little Fuzzy_:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18137

the audiobook read by Tabithat is just about professional quality and is highly recommended:

https://librivox.org/little-fuzzy-by-h-beam-piper/

Oh, there's a market for lightweight backpacking gear, all right! Check out Backpacking Light for in-depth reviews.

Garage Grown Gear has some of the trendy light and ultralight stuff.

1. https://backpackinglight.com/

2. https://www.garagegrowngear.com/

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