Barbecue Spruce-up
Build Series #8
When I woke up on a couple weeks ago and saw the black clouds hanging low and blank over the valley below my mountain, I knew I was in trouble.
Going by the numbers—which, in my part of the world, means “keeping an eye on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and related macro-climactic patterns”—I was expecting a pretty intense winter with the first big snow dump coming sometime in late November or early December.
Nature had other plans. A big bomb cyclone a couple thousand miles wide decided to pound everything west of the Rockies with rain, snow, ice, wind, and generally did to the landscape what a teenager flash mob does to an upscale home. In our neck of the woods, even though the temperatures never dipped below freezing, we got several inches of heavy snows that stuck to the chicken yard wire and blocked the long road up to the nearest neighbor’s house.
That right there is gonna be a fun repair job later this winter…but that’s a build for another day.
Those of you who’ve been following me long enough know that this means I have to do a LOT of hand-plowing.
But in the run-up to winter, I was getting a bunch of little projects done around the homestead—things that would make the winter a lot more bearable. One of those involved getting the outdoor kitchen upgraded in anticipation of the upcoming Thanksgiving festivities.
Smoked home-cured ham and turkey are on this year’s menu. Unfortunately, the barbecue/smoker setup was in pretty rough shape—rust, peeling paint, and other signs of age that made it look junky and will, if left unattended, ultimately shorten its life.
There was another problem, too:
Barbecue tools.
As you can see from the above picture of the barbecue, the low shelf where one customarily keeps barbecue tools is the housing for a secondary smoker which gets a lot of use during food preservation season. I was getting tired of these space-parasites living on the counter (where they looked messy and were getting in the way of my cabinet-building project, anyway).
Something had to be done, and since I was gonna spend the afternoon doing maintenance on the barbecue anyway, I figured it was a good time to get some practice on a vital skill:
Repeatability.
I headed out to the forge, lit the fire, and started heating up some small pieces of rebar…
And I heat-and-beat the hell out of them until I had what looked like a pile of petrified sperm cells…
I was actually aiming to do sculpted leaf finials, but the tooling I had didn’t work well enough to pull that off (stay tuned for next week’s build article, where I fix that problem!), so I decided to content myself with spade shapes.
The hardest thing in the forge is doing anything twice (or, in this case, four or five times). You can see the level of my skill development here by looking at those four hunks of metal. They’re close to the same size/shape/length, and the spade finials on them look like they have a kind of family resemblance, but they don’t really look like a matched set. Repeatability comes through practice—as of this project, I discovered that I was starting to close in on that goal, but I still have a bit of a way to go.
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Once I got my full pile of metal sperm, I drilled holes in the spade finials and bent them into J-hooks with safety curls at the end.
Almost a matched set. Thankfully, it’s good enough for what I’ve got in mind.
After hitting them with a wire brush and some paste-wax to make them resistant to rust, they got mounted to the barbecue with some metal screws.
The full set of five make handsome hangers for the barbecue tools. Add that to a go-over of the barbecue with the wire brush and some phosphoric acid (to kill the rust and create a paintable surface), and a finish with barbecue paint, and a new, small touch of civilization joins the homestead.
And, since it is meat preservation season, I handed the setup over to my partner-in-homesteading for a ten hour ham smoke.
This is what a week of curing and ten hours of low-temp smoke will do for your ham. It tastes even better than it looks—beats the pants off even the best stuff you can buy in a top-flight gourmet San Francisco butcher shop.
Hopefully the Thanksgiving crowd agrees…assuming that we don’t wind up eating it all before they get here.
Of course, if we do, there’s always this guy…
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