Did We Really Do That?

During a hot summer one year Tim and I decided that it would be really nice to have a barbeque at his parent’s house. We arranged for Tim’s family to join in.

In getting everything ready for said barbeque we established that the barbeque really wasn’t large enough to cook a meal adequate for all of us. We decided we needed something bigger. Much Bigger!

My father used to have an engineering company so we thought it would be a neat idea to head over to his factory and make our own barbeque that would be large enough for the job. Once there we each had different ideas as to what would be the ideal design. Rather than argue about it we agreed to make two BBQ’s.

We both had the same basic ideas but neither of us wishing to ‘make do’ with a basic or flimsy design we chose heavy gauge steel for the main part of the BBQ along with a heavy galvanised steel grill area plus a higher grill to keep food warm. The legs of each were made from steel tube, again in heavy gauge.

Once we had finished we both admired our work and set about clearing everything away.

The first issue was that both of he BBQ’s had been so well engineered that they were almost too heavy to carry. They had to be carried between us. The second problem was that when it was time to fire up the BBQ that evening each of the required more than one bag of charcoal to fill it!

The final insult came later that evening after we had consumed far too much food. The heat of the charcoal had been intense enough to make the zinc coating on the grill stick to the food. Not knowing this we had eaten the food anyway which lead to a nasty case of zinc poisoning. Lovely!

The barbeques lasted for years and performed very well – as long as you had enough charcoal!

Matt

[Technorati tag(s): Did we really do that?, Crazy, Stupid]