This little guy has been troublesome from the start.
I found it on LetGo on a Saturday evening in Central Florida in early April and I sent a message that same evening. I got up at 5:30 the next morning and saw the seller had just responded and would be available all day to pick it up. Sweet! Nothing better than a Kettle-acquisition road trip on a beautiful spring Sunday.
I started coffee and plotted our course to the seller’s general location, a little bit southwest of Orlando. Even better, we could grab some good eats on the way through Orlando and plenty of shopping to entertain the wife. With a plan in place, I packed up the truck for a day trip, woke the wife and dog up around 8, and we were on the road by 9. I sent the seller a message as we embarked for our day trip.
An easy traffic-free drive into Orlando put us at our favorite dim sum spot for brunch around 11-ish. Still no response from the seller, perhaps attending church service? After eating we hopped a little further southwest towards the seller and stopped at a mall to kill some time. (This is the unspoken reciprocation with my wife for my impromptu and often illogical kettle road trips). Still no response from the seller. I’m starting to think maybe he isn’t an early-riser like me and their message from 5am was before they went to sleep after a night of partying. I send another message through LetGo and on a whim, check OfferUp and I see the same grill from the same seller - sent ANOTHER message. It’s early afternoon by now, and time to start thinking about an early dinner before routing home. We opt for Korean BBQ not far from our current location... in the last chance hope the seller will respond while we eat. No luck... we make the three hour drive home Sunday evening full-bellied but empty-handed. I knew the risk and it just wasn’t meant to be. I’m ok with that, we still had a great day.
Of course, Monday morning, response from the seller via OfferUp, “you can come pick it up any time today”. Dammit. Just my luck. Fortunately, I’m part of a really awesome grillfella network that can help in such a situation. I enlisted the help of our infamous @Rub who lives nearby and he graciously agrees to pick it up after work. Once secured, he sent a couple pictures which confirms this is indeed an 18” red Bar-B-Kettle with the user-installed daisy wheels, racing triangle, and wheels without whitewalls; the most basic variant once the One-Touch was introduced. I didn’t know there were 18” versions of the BBK, let alone red. Neat! It’s an ER code which matches my red SSP.... Color looks kinda funky though.
As luck would have it, I had work meetings in Orlando the following week and once those were done, I met Rub at his place to pick up the BBK, perv his collection of cookers, and generally just shoot the shit for awhile. It is always nice to hang with other WKC’ers and this was no exception. Rub is a great guy and still to this day I talk about how his money muscle changed my life. True story.
Later on that week, I started a fire in it and the fumes and discoloration confirmed my fears, someone had spray painted the kettle. So now I’m in the process of painstakingly scraping off all the red paint from a red kettle that barely has any flaws. As far as I can tell, there is some rim rash painted over, but no other flaws in the lid. I’ve more or less finished the lid and handles and will start on the bowl this weekend. I’ll most likely have to cut off the bowl vents to remove overspray too.
I’ll post the fully restored kettle once completed, but I’m definitely laughing at myself for undertaking such a PITA for a $12 grill. More importantly, I wanted to give a shout out to Rub for agenting this pretty neat BBK. I think I will name it Albatross once it’s back in cooking rotation.
Thanks for looking
☀️[emoji41]✌️
Sent from my iPhone using
Weber Kettle Club
Topic: PITA 18.5” Red BBK (Read 1492 times)
