We began UltraGrip with a blunt target: replace 20–30 grams of fixed pot handles with something you barely notice— less than the weight of a U.S. nickel (4.50 g)—without giving up control, comfort, or durability. Anyone who’s cooked on trail knows the tradeoffs of attached handles: they rattle in your pack, run hot next to the flame, and add permanent weight to every mile. Our solution had to do the same job at a fraction of the mass and then live inside your pot alongside your stove, fuel canister, and lighter so the whole kit packs cleaner and quieter.
Shape Before Metal: Let Physics Draw the Minimum
We started with shape, not metal. If the geometry isn’t sure-handed, nothing else matters. We carved a grip that naturally indexes your fingers and bites a thin titanium rim without wobble. From there we used generative design—a design method where you give software the forces the part must survive and the “no-go” zones for hands and pot walls, and it preserves material only where it carries load. Think of it as letting physics draw the minimum truss. That’s why the Pot Hopper looks skeletal and organic: every curve earns its place.
Generative design process behind one of the pot hopper jaws. Blue is low force and green is higher force.
Why Aluminum Beat Titanium
Material choice was inseparable from how we’d build the part. We tried high-temperature polymers like PEEK and advanced nylons because they’re light and stable at camp temperatures. They failed in one specific way: the hinge. The Pot Hopper uses a 0.6 mm spring at the pivot, and that tiny contact area sees shear—a sideways sliding force—over tens of thousands of open/close cycles to simulate a thru-hike. The polymers slowly deformed there and lost their bite.
That pushed us to metal additive manufacturing, a process where a laser fuses layers of aluminum powder into a solid shape. We also modeled a titanium version. The surprise was that titanium’s famous strength didn’t win here—density did. Because the grip must keep surface area for comfort (your fingers don’t like knife-edges), the titanium design ended up heavier overall. Aluminum’s lower density let us keep the ergonomic shape and still come in lighter. Virtual stress testing (called FEA, finite element analysis) confirmed we could reinforce only where loads demanded it and trim everywhere else.
Working chamber Desktop Laser sintering machine loaded with aluminum powder.
The Nitinol Hinge: One Part, Two Jobs
The hinge is the heart of the mechanism. We designed a custom nitinol element to do two jobs at once: it is both the pivot pin and the spring. Nitinol is an alloy of nickel and titanium known for superelasticity—it can flex far and return to its original shape without taking a set. Beyond medicine, nitinol is used in satellites and automatic deployment mechanisms such as folded solar panels in space and even wheel systems tested for Mars rovers. It’s chosen because it stores and releases energy reliably with very little mass.
We trialed multiple wire diameters and landed on 0.6 mm as the sweet spot: low effort to actuate, high resistance to the worst-case shear when you lift a full pot by the rim.
A small but important detail: The Pot Hopper is normally open. The spring makes the arms “bounce” apart by default, so you squeeze to close on the rim and release to let it pop free. This means you can cook without a handle soaking up heat, then re-attach instantly when it’s time to move the pot.
Mars rover wheel prototype made of Nitinol (Photo credit: NASA)
From Prototype to Field-Ready
Iteration did the rest. Our lightest working prototype hit 3.8 g, which felt like magic until abuse tests. Real kits aren’t gentle—grippers rattle around with stoves and fuel. We modeled odd-angle impacts, then thickened a few vulnerable struts. The result is a production design just under 5 g that still meets the original goal— lighter than the weight of a nickel—and shrugs off the knocks of real use. We finish the printed aluminum with a bright-orange ceramic coating: a thin, hard surface that improves abrasion resistance and makes UltraGrip easy to spot in duff and dusk.
Pot Hopper lifting a 750ml 0.2mm walled titanium pot.
Where the Pot Hopper Shines
The Pot Hopper is optimized for solo to two-person kits and narrower titanium pots typical in ultralight setups—around 750 ml feels perfect. It also works on cylindrical pots up to roughly 1100 ml, but physics still applies: torque (twisting load) grows with pot size. In simple terms, torque = weight × radius, so very wide cookware places more twisting load on the jaw and your hand. When in doubt, choose taller and narrower over short and wide.
