NEW WSM 22.5 Charcoal Grate/Vent tang interferance solution

[Lou]

I cooked on my new 22.5 last Saturday and confirmed what I had read about the minor design flaw wherein the charcoal grate, sitting on the lower leg bolts inside the fire chamber, interferes slightly with the lower metal tangs that protrude from the vent diaphram into the four vent holes.
The degree of interferance is perhaps slight but when you want to close or open entirely it prevents you.

My fix was to fabricate three "angle" brackets 1 1/2" on the long side with a bolt hole at 3/4" and 1" on the other end and a bend of approx 60 degrees at the angle point. I used 3/16x1 bar to fabricate these.

I then simply removed the lower leg bolt nut and placed the brackets over the bolt and replaced the nut.

The photos show it pretty well. The solution was fast and effective.

[Gold Bar-B-Q Bob Beeman]

Excellent fix Lou.You should market that one. Kind of makes me wonder how Weber could let these ship without fixing this first. Is that a drip pan on the outside bottom?

[Laren Monson]

Thanks Lou for the Fix'r for the vent Tang's, those darn tang's can be annoying at times, I think I'm going to get two of those units here pretty quick, in looking at the picture's is there room under the top grate to add another grill just above the door line, but I wonder if the door latch would hit the new grill just above it ? I'd be going down to Sutter's and be looking this week-end. Laren

[Lou]

No. the pan on the bottom is a heat shield to help protect surfaces beneath the cooker.

I should try to sell the solution to Weber I guess. It's so simple and it works.

I'm looking forward to my next cook to test my vent control with the fix.

FYI I took internal temps at half hour intervals and plotted them. If I can get an excel chart to download I'll put then on your site. It is amazingly consistent.

Lou

[Lou]

I think you could add another grate. I havn't look at this carefully but my guess is there should be enough room for things like ribs etc. The door latch is quite thin so I don't think it would interfere.

My first WSM and I love it. I'm going to have another so I can compete as a WSM exclusive team and sell my Brinkmann Cimarron. These are so portable and air tight they will be a snap to haul around.

Lou

[Gold Bar-B-Q Bob Beeman]

At the bottom of the “Reply to this” box go to Attach File(s): select browse… you should be able to attach an Excel or any other file.

[Lou]

Now that I think about your question of a third cooking grate, why couldn't a person fabricate new drop bars that hold the cooking grates and water pan so that the water pan is dropped down a few inches and the space for cooking grates is then devided into three spaces? The 22.5 holds the water pan quite high above the fire ring.

Lou