I have the exact same cooker in way worse shape.
. Grate straps, buddy, mine are completely black and coated with creosote. I do absolutely nothing to them. If you can’t get them to budge then they probably aren’t going to fall off! Lol
I remove rust from surfaces my food touches. Your food never touches the grate strap. That would be filed under “screw this, I’m cooking” and I’d pretty much never think of it again.
Many of the Virtual WSM guys use the base of a flower pot (one of those orange terra-cotta ones) as the deflector. Some of them fill it with sand to use as a heat sink. Even if you want water and use a clay pot, you can always fill a disposable aluminum pan with water and use that. My water pan leaks - I use the aluminum loan in the water pan, bonus cleanup is easier.
Mine is a bit out of round and leaks air like a bitch. So it runs HOT. I mediate this by running a small snake around the base instead of filling the pan with coal and/or using the minion method. This works really really well and has again checked off another pain off my list. In the past I have also wrapped it with a fire blanket to help stop extra air from flowing in, but the snake works so well that’s all I do anymore.
I did buy a Cajun Bandit door and consider that a very worthwhile investment.
At least your legs are straight! Mine look like a kicked dog!
Despite all that, she is a fabulous cooker and I’m about to fire her up right now. My philosophy is that cooking on this is an art, not a science. She takes a little more babysitting than most, and won’t ever be set and forget, but I can still pull off an overnight and often leave my teens at home with the Maverick remote while I run to the store. They text me if the temp goes too high or low, mostly it’s low because my snake ran out of fuel.
If I wanted something I didn’t have to think about, I’d just go eat out. Fire that bad boy up, learn it’s quirks and start producing fabulous bbq. You see people making smokers out of all kinds of junk and producing bbq. You have a leg up on them - yours was actually designed to do it!!
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