We finally had some time to get the 26er up and running. It needed a little TLC before it was in cooking condition.
If you remember, there was a broken off leg socket, so that was the first order of business. The first thing I did was file the broken off welds, and drill out the holes in the kettle.
Three little hits with the welder and you couldn't even tell it had been broken off. Even the porcelain on the outside didn't notice. (I guess I forgot a pic of the finished socket...)
This next part might be a little tough for some to swallow. This grill had two holes in the kettle that needed to be repaired. They were located on the outside of the kettle, behind the brackets that hold the grates inside the kettle. My suspicion is that as the kettle heated up and cooled during cooks throughout the years, those brackets heated and cooled at a different rate, the porcelain on the outside cracked off under the stress and the metal started to rust, and rust until finally there was a hole. Like I said, there were two of these holes. Each of them were big enough that you could put two finger-tips through them. Here is one of them: (That rusty metal you see inside the hole is the backside of the grate-bracket. It had also deformed and pushed in from the expansion of the rust.)
A shot from the inside:
I started the slow process of building up what was gone with the welder. It was a long process because it consisted of short little tack-welds that had to cool before more were put on top. I wanted to be carful not to put too much heat into the kettle so it didn't lose any more porcelain.
Here you can see the process:
And here is the plugged up hole:
Some of you who've worked with metal before are probably asking why I didn't make up a patch and weld that patch in. The problem is that I do not have any metal working tools so there is no way I could match the curvature of the kettle-bowl. This way was tedious, but worked in the end.
And here it is after clean up with a flap-disk on an angle grinder:
It's certainly not perfect, but it's "17-quad-tra-zillion" times better than a big rusty hole.
You can see some splatter damage from the welder in these pics, but it is very confined to a small area, and part of the price of repairing such damage.
Here is an example of what heat can do to these kettles. As I was welding these small tacks, I could hear the kettle not liking the process. The porcelain kept making sounds as it would cool. At one point my wife called me back in the house to help her move some furniture. When I came back out to the garage, the grill had fully cooled, and you could see small chards of porcelain on the ground.
While this kind of talk usually makes me cringe, it wasn't a big deal, because we are only talking about the outside millimeter of the larger rust spot that had formed.
OK, now it's time to put some legs on it and cook!!
This is what was on the menu. I get them at Aldi's. My wife loves them...
We added a few potato wedges slathered in olive oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary. And this is what we ended up with. It's funny, what doesn't look like much on this big grill was actually too much for my family of three to eat!
She's not a looker....BUT SHE'S A COOKER!!!!!!!
Topic: First cook on the Brownie 26er (Read 4328 times)