You mean foil baking? Thats easy just let the fire burn down to embers first. We dont do enough of that type of cooking
Ive had corn on the cob done that way with a knob of butter and afterwards you dont want to eat corn on the cob any other way.
Creek water is hardly bush craft Everyone drinks it. Billy over a fire will boil very quickly but the billy gets black soot all over it which gets over everything. Made the mistake of putting a billy that had been used on a fire in the dishwasher when I got home. Afterwards the only clean thing was the billy and everything washed in there for the next 3 weeks came out covered in black flecks. Apparently coating the outside of the billy helps keep it clean.
Real bushcraft is cooking real porridge on the fire
This post has been edited by the author on 28 June 2015 at 19:19.
"Apparently coating the outside of the billy helps keep it clean"
With soap, they say though I've never bothered. Once I was a tad irritated because someone kindly washed my billy and took all that lovely blacking off. But they were so proud of their kindness, so I said nothing...
That black brings up an interesting question as we are due for a lively debate. Black absorbs heat better but at the same time it does not conduct heat as well as clean metal. Will the billy boil quicker or slower?
re possums and cattle. some research was done on a farm near a forest park, they wondered why so many cattle were getting TB and the carrying capacity of the land wasnt as high as it should have been, cant recall where..
turns out at night, a large no of possums were coming onto the farmland to eat the grass at night, they tracked possums that were travelling, i thought they said descending hundreds of metres down a mountain every night to come and eat the grass then climbing back up again at the end of it.. there was footage of cows and possums nose to nose with each other as the cows checked out the possums.
This post has been edited by the author on 28 June 2015 at 19:31.
Yeah, I find that sadly ironic too.
I think that the black billy might boil a smidge faster than the uncoated, but with a decent heat source the difference would be fairly small.
"2, the black surface colour is only an advantage if the heat source is optical (i.e. light, because black colours absorb all lightwaves) not as in this case, the embers of a fire..."
I respectfully disagree with you there pipeking. Most of the heating effect from the embers of a fire is through infrared radiation (radiant heat) or from conduction between the hot embers and the bottom of the billy if it is touching. Black is a good absorber of infrared radiation as well as the visible wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Much of what is emitted from the sun is infrared, and we get a lot of that infrared radiation, along with the visible wavelengths, in sunlight. Most of the heating effect on a black object in sunlight is from the absorbed infrared rather than the visible wavelengths. Anyway, Im not sure that we need a science debate! Just my 2c
If anyone has a clean and unclean billy and wanted to test it, I would be interested.
Done the test on an electric range before following a similar conversation. Sooty billies take far longer to boil - as @pipeking says presumably the layer of soot acts as an insulator between the element and the metal/contents.
Might be different on a fire though where much of the heat is radiant, not conductive.
This post has been edited by the author on 29 June 2015 at 13:11.
So much for that attempt to divert this thread from the other touchy subject that was popping up.
I would of leant the same way but could see a reason it might not be so but not having tested it.
The jury is back with the verdict clean your billys.
I will admit to having forgotten to take convection into account. Was mainly looking at conduction and radiation. Simple error on my part.
Id side with keeping em clean anyway, no matter what effect the soot has because a clean billy doesnt leave muck all over the rest of your gear or your pack etc.
This post has been edited by the author on 29 June 2015 at 19:56.
Interesting science. I've learnt something...
I'm too lazy to clean the outside of mine! I envisage all that scrubbing might scrub away the metal. On the other hand, then the billy would be lighter. I just keep the billy in a plastic bag which gets washed after the trip.
