Repair and touch-up of bent up MT Handle

[SixZeroFour]

So after the ongoing shipping incident with UPS I finally spent a few days working on/repairing the St Louis MT. As soon as I saw the damage while unboxing I stopped immediately and hadn't moved it from that spot in over two weeks. It was fun to finally unwrap all the other bits and see the new handles, shiny parts and owners manual. UPS is screwing me around big time regarding the insurance (big shock) and I just got fed up with not being able to enjoy this thing.

Since this is a looker not a cooker for me I decided to touch up the badly chipped areas @ the handle and a bit on the lid. The first order of business was to bend the handle back to the original shape. It took a good amount of force to bend so they must have dropped it good.







I had a set of channel lock pliers that fit into the bent handle perfectly and allowed me to slowly finesse it back into shape. After a lot of fine adjustments I had it looking pretty straight...



Red dust included with the shipping free of charge 



Slowly looking better...



Next I brushed on some primer using a small brush..





Few more patches...



I then painted on a flat cherry red paint which turned out to be a surprisingly good match.







Is it perfect? Nope, but it sure looks a hell of a lot better now!

Stay tuned for better finished pics of "Jerome"...

[Cuda Dan]

604 Nice job on the repair (to bad you had at all!). What was the brand of red paint?

[SixZeroFour]

I channeled my childhood and used some testors model paint  (Flat Red) *This is not high heat paint! nor have I tested it!*

Note that this matched the non-fade nicely on this teenage MT but it's too light of a red for older MBH reds.

Once I laid down the primer/paint I used a razor blade to scrape the paint back to the exact edge of the damage. This worked really well and cleans up the "Overbrush" onto the good parts of the finish.

[pbe gummi bear]

Looking good, 604. The scraping of overbrush is a great idea. I hope that firing it up and using it gives you some closure.

[wyd]

Nice job repairing your kettle.  Very neatly done.

[DirectDrive]

I feel your pain on that UPS damage !

Very nice job on the repair !


I repaired a chip on my WSM with high heat epoxy for the filler.
Very tedious job !
http://weberkettleclub.com/forums/weber-kettles-accessories/weber-porcelain-repair/msg99251/#msg99251

[Golly]

good to see you are back in the game