A few weeks back my wife went out and cleaned the inside of our grill out. I had been avoiding this myself, but not because I'm lazy. I was avoiding it, because I had realized that the inside of the grill was so rusted that if the balance of rust, greasy glue, lava rocks and remnants of grill shards were upset or altered the ecostructure of gas shafts would be clogged and the grill would not cook evenly.

My wife hadn't picked up on this and I made the stupid mistake of not discussing my theory out loud - go figure.

So when she cleaned it out, the burner flaked apart and when we attempted to light it post cleaning, we only got a big yellow flame sticking up about 7 inches above the grill on the right hand side. Quick turn it off before it Blows UP!

We were not really ready to buy a new grill. This one came with our house when we bought, as did the last grill we had before this one (with our previous house). We actually hadn't bought a grill ourselves since 1997 and it had been rebuilt twice and painted 3 times before it rusted away to nothingness.

So I started browsing for grills and almost bought a nice stainless steel number at Sam's, but I was too slow and a bargain slipped away from me. But I was getting desperate the last few weeks. We live off of our grill and microwaving stuff was getting old.

So today, I took the old one apart and tried to figure out if it could be repaired. No Such Luck. :(

So I went to Home Depot, saw some decent ones. Drove across the street to Lowe's saw some OK ones. I kept noticing that the grills with iron cast burners seemed to be a lot more expensive. I didn't want my burners rusting away so I figured this was my best bet.

The thing is most of the iron cast burner types cost $700 or more and I didn't want to spend that much on a grill. I was thinking like $100. Hey I'm cheap sometimes.

I went back to Home Depot and found one that had the right burners for $269. The lady there told me if I found one with a dent she'd give me a bigger discount so I 'found' a dent. I was getting ready to pull it to the counter and realized that even though it looked the same on the outside, it actually had the cheaper stainless steel burners that rust inside.

So I then grabbed one that looked the same but had the better burners and got it for $239.

This monstrosity barely fit in the mini van. I had taken my son's dog Cheddar, and bought her some beef jerkey on the way out of the store. We snacked on jerkey and headed home.

So I finally have a grill again, and it cooked up some steaks just fine tonight.

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