DrewZ
TVWBB Fan
If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a video worth a thousand pictures? Does that make a video worth a million words? I hope so, because I just didn't have the energy last night to do a proper summary of yesterday's work . . .
The day began with installing the black durawood slats in the z bars. The bottom shelf has one 9-slat rack from the 3000 and a 4-slat rack cut from the 3000's other 9-slat rack. (Not pictured: cutting, shaping and re-drilling the remaining 5-slat remnants to create the top right shelf)
Looks fairly complete, no? NO. Lesson #472: It's relatively quick and easy to make it look like a grill; it's another thing entirely to make it work like a grill . . .
So, a valve cleaning was in order.
Then, a combination of a C clamp, 3lb hammer, angle grinder and foul language to modify the 3000's center burner.
After looking at the first picture, I wasn't happy with the apparent gap at the end of the tube, so I took it back out and spent considerably more time trying to whack the thing shut. I tested it by covering all of the burner holes with duct tape and shooting water through the tube from a hose. Then a little break for beauty pageant . . .
Then onto the control panel and the actual functional bits. Clearly the control panel needed some cosmetic help.
With a little hard work (and buying a new panel off of Offerup
), it now looks like this . . .
Then onto the manifold and panel support. The 1000's manifold brackets mount directly to the Jr.'s firebox and manifold support with no modification. I had previously cut the igniter bracket from the 3000. It's now installed with just a nice, tight compression fit. I may revisit to add some kind of L-bracket if necessary. One of the choices created by going to a 3-burner setup was what to do about the igniter. The Jr.'s igniter is mounted vertically on the front, directly underneath the control panel. The igniter panel also functions as a trim panel to cover the gap between the firebox and the right leg. I harvested the corresponding trim panel from the 1000. I'm not sure whether I'm just going to modify the plain trim panel from the 1000, or use the Jr.'s panel -- perhaps with an S-hook coming out of the unused igniter hole.
Once all the guts were in place, I did a flame test. Initially, the center burner only had flame at the crossover tube end, which made me think that maybe I didn't get the end sealed as well as I thought I did. Thankfully, an adjustment to the shutter fixed the issue.
So, now what? I'm not entirely happy with the top right shelf, so I'll probably dicker around with that to get the spacing the way I want. I still need to install the tank scale and figure out what to do about the front trim panel . . . and I guess I'll need to actually cook on it too. There will be pictures.
For the time being, I put in the original panel.
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