Mystery of the Water Pan

[Don Hilliard]

This morning as I was firing up my WSM I used my Smokey Joe to hold the chimney. I set the lid aside unaware of the revelation I was about to have. As the charcoal was ashing over I disassembled the WSM and placed the water pan next to the Smokey Joe lid. I put the WSM back together after adding my charcoal using the ECB (Brinkmann)pan that I always use now and then I saw the light. I had not one, but two Smokey Joe lids except one did not have a handle or vent. The two were identical except for the afore mentioned items. As I investigated this phenomena I realized that the reason the pan does not hold enough water and almost falls into the charcoal is that it's not a pan, but lid flipped upside down. Maybe Weber should put a bigger lip on the lids so that the pans fit better. Anyway I found this to be a little amusing and I guess Weber saves a dollar or two on each WSM. If Weber is listening, please change 3 things, bigger water pan, put in a hole to mount a thermometer, and fix the charcoal grate. I'd pay the extra couple of bucks so that I don't have to fix these things myself.
By the way I'm doing a modified recipe of BRITU that I plan to cook for about 5 to 6 hours at 230*F. I'll let you know how they come out.
Don

 

[Guest]

Hi Don,
That is pretty funny. I use the Brinkmann charcoal pan for the water pan. It fits even better than the WSM water pan and it holds twice as much water (2 gallons). But, even with the larger pan, I found that if you bend each lip up and out about 1/2" to 1", it holds the pan much better and doesn't even have a chance of falling off.I noticed when I was assembling my 2 WSM's that the lips seem kind of spread too far apart. Bending slightly fixed that for good.