jdbower

I know it's been mentioned before, but this seems to be a good place to consolidate product references. I just got my BillyBar on Saturday based on some recommendations and it looks like it'll work great and last a lifetime.

There was a suggestion for a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser in this thread.

I've found that most computer errors can be attributed to a loose nut behind the keyboard - at least when I'm around...

Thanks for the heads up, it had stopped over here but chances are what you're getting will head East to me shortly...

Now I'm even more glad I built it, after some much needed rain the "Sanny-box" is as stable as ever but the ground around it is all mush! I don't think there will be a problem with supporting a cooker on it

Ah for the heady days of being a teenager, back when I knew everything and had all the answers. Boy have I gotten dumb since then! John Ratzenberger (the guy who played Cliffy) is an interesting character in his own right. He's actually got a drive to encourage kids to tinker - not that I was a tinkerer myself as a child, of course!

Planter? Just get a tarp and you've got yourself a perfectly usable swimming pool! If women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy

Yes, but the thought of pimping out my big green baby was disturbing enough my brain wanted to change the subject

"Pimp My Tractor", now that would be an interesting show! Are we talking about a Pat's EZ-Hitch, a hydraulic toplink and other useful toys or is this lowering the tractor with some neon underlights and some chrome spinners? Either way, amusement galore!

Thanks, it's a John Deere 2520 and has proven very useful here (pulling out fenceposts is fun!). The tiller is nice for leveling out some of the rough ground, plus I've got a chipper, loader and backhoe. I think I'll have to get some pallet forks to help move the cooker around, it's more fun than a bunch of guys with 2x4s. It was actually an innocent post on a tractor forum that brought me ultimately to you guys, I hadn't had an excuse to look at ceramic cookers until some kind folks there enlightened me to their benefits.

I haven't even decided what to order yet but I've got a home for when it's delivered! Now that I think I've ticked over two days old I can post this with an image - so this post actually is appropriate in the off-topic images forum (I hope!) I'm in the process of trying to get a house built (and have been for the past 21 months, but that's another story) so I have no level surfaces to put a cooker. I had initially thought of leaving the cooker on the packing pallet for a few months, but Sanny pointed out that the cheap disposable wood used in most shipping material would likely not be fire resistant enough to be safe. Couple that with the weather taking its toll on the wood and you're just begging for an accident whether it manifests as a fire or a tipped cooker. After hearing a few suggestions for quick and dirty solutions it occurred to me that building a small real patio isn't all that tough. So two trips to Lowes, about $100 (including a one-time expense for a decent tamper), and roughly three working hours later I've got a home built. In phase one I built a 3'x3' frame out of 6" wide decking material, used some metal braces for the corners to add rigidity and attach some stakes. Phase two was to till up the area where the patio was to go - this helped kill off the grass, level out the rough ground, and allow me to dig out the middle of the area much easier. Phase three - many whacks of a sledgehammer later the frame is sunk into the ground. Phase four (the picture was actually in the middle of this phase) involved 100lbs of gravel topped with 375lbs of sand - I made myself a Sanny box! Finally I got the slate-look pavers into the frame before the cats mistook it for a luxury litterbox and filled the gaps with more sand. Each tile measures level in both directions and are fairly even at the seams so hopefully it was a success. I even kept a bit of a lip around the border in case things start to slide around for some reason. I did learn a few things: 1) Always measure the bottom of the tile - 17.5" at the top meant about 17.75" on the bottom after I trimmed off some slop from the formed concrete paver. Luckily I built the frame a little larger but the rubber mallet got a workout. 2) If you're not sure if the paver has a scratch or a hairline crack, it's a hairline crack even if you rub it and it goes away. 3) It's really hard to concentrate on image composition when you're busy trying not to get dirt all over your expensive camera! Good practice for a real patio once the house is built and when I'm done with it I only have to dispose of 12 linear feet of treated lumber and (after some fun with a sledgehammer) a small pile of rubble that should be great for drainage fill. With the green toy in the second shot moving a KK around and disposing of a little patio should be a cinch

I thought American Cricket was just what the Brits call baseball? England liked baseball so much that they stole the idea and created cricket. Funny thing was we had a big laugh and wrote the rules upside down and backwards so they'd be incomprehensible and the Brits never caught on. Great, now I want to get me some more Violet Crumble...

So these Ashes that you 'Stralians are always on about, is that just stuff you cleaned out of your KK?

Komodo isn't just the name of an Indonesian island, I believe that the origins of the name for the cooker stem from the Komodo Dragon (who, of course, draws its name from the island). Quoting the Wikipedia page: "The Komodo Dragon's loosely articulated jaws, flexible skull, and expandable stomach allows it to eat up to 80 percent of its body weight in one meal. After eating, it drags itself to a sunny spot to speed digestion" From what I've been reading, that pretty much describes a weekend with a KK, eating 80% of your body weight and then sleeping it off in the sun. OK, time for a good old wrist slap - probably would have been better off in the Jokes forum now that I see this is a generic photos forum (I'll get a post up here once my username ages properly, apparently we need to be simmered slowly for a few days so we don't post naughty pictures right away...)

There's an ugliest color contest? I wonder if they make hot pink, lime green and fluorescent orange tiles? Or I can pimp it out like an import racer with a huge spoiler, a 6" exhaust port, a gold-plated spinner on the damper, and racing stripes - yeah, racing stripes will make it cook extra fast!

You're getting rid of the poor dog in the lower right? He looks so sad! And yes, a covered means of cooking outdoors is coming but I'll have to wait for the house to be built. In another forum Sanny rightfully objected to my suggestion that I may be able to get away with cooking on the shipping pallet for a few months so I decided to build a small patio just for the cooker. If I had bothered to calculate the amount of sand I'd need it would have been a job done in a few hours.

I'm afraid if I pitch the "we can cook all year round" issue it will come back to bite me as I'm huddled around the cooker in the winter time wishing for a little more radiant heat and cursing the efficiency of the thing. I actually just got back from building the beginnings of my mini-patio. I've built a ~3'x3' wooden form and it's filled with WAAAY too little sand and gravel, but I knew I didn't have enough when I picked it up (I more wanted to see how much I'd need once the form was set into the ground with 1' deep stakes). I'll try to get some pictures up when I'm done - right now I'm pooped as winter gave spring a miss and went straight into summer (to paraphrase Monty Python).

I never thought to pitch it as a kitchen expense before, that may work! Actually the breadmaker factor may win her over, and we just came back from Switzerland where she loved the brick oven pizza (next best thing to good old Jersey Pizza!). What are we doing with the old house? Well, SOMETHING'S got to fuel the grill Interesting note, a quote tag apparently counts as an HTML link so I'm now in the suspected spammer bin. Wanna buy some cheap meds?

Thanks! I'm still in the research phase (read: my wife has no idea how much these cost so there's a lot of convincing in my future ) so there's nothing to show yet. Heck, I'm still mostly homeless (in the process of building a new house behind the existing one) so I don't have any place to put a cooker - but Sanny helped guide me as to how to solve that issue the right way!