JeffB

Re: better solution

Chris Lilly recommends you cook with skin side down but I forgot to and mine turned out fine. I only had a little bit of skin on my shoulder though. It did make me curious as to the why. Which way are you planning on doing it?

The head of my grill floss was not particularly tight when delivered. It wasn't loose but the head would still move around a little when you used it and no amount of tightening the screw would take up the slop. So, I pulled the screw and head out and closed up the edges of the handle in my bench vise. I closed it up enough that putting the head back in required a little persuasion (from a mallet). Now the head has no slop. While I was at it I also bent the end of the handle over a little bit so that the angle between the head and handle is more like 115 degrees now (comes pretty close to 90). That gives the handle a little more clearance so I am not banging the lip of the Komodo all the time. So far so good.

Okay. That is what I thought you were referring to but just wanted to make sure -- nice to have validation that the behavior I saw was not just a figment of my imagination. Hopefully I didn't do any damage to the welds which hold the tubes to the frame. Metal doesn't generally mind a little bending but bending back and forth is never good. If worse comes to worst I am going to have to learn how to weld stainless steel

Just a followup to my last post... I would not recommend anyone "tweak" the tubes like I did to get the door to slide more freely. A proper seal of the draft door seems to require some tension in the system. If you remove all tension then it simply doesn't seal properly and you will have trouble controlling your temperatures. I have since re-adjusted my tubes (back to the way they were) and just live with needing to jiggle the door a little to get it out (when the tubes get dirty).

I am not sure how Dennis manages to have a life with all the stuff that comes his way. But rest assured, Dennis takes care of his customers and "puts his money where his mouth is". I already knew he had a reputation for great customer service but it is still great to witness it first hand.

Re: Cigar smoke Huh. And all this time I have been purposely running away from "chicks" who own bass boats. If I would have only known they were the keepers...

I am a former gasser who decided he had had enough and started down the road of researching charcoal options. I originally was just going to go with a Weber Performer (kettle-style) and then remembered hearing about ceramic cookers. So I started walking down that path looking at the Big Green Egg and then moving over to a Grill Dome. Finally I stumbled upon the Naked Whiz's site and his review of the KK. Once I saw how the KK addressed all those little nagging issues of the other guys and the fantastic build quality I was sold. So, I was a little surprised the other day when I checked out the review again and I barely recognized the cooker he was reviewing. Dennis has made so many improvements since the Whiz's model was built that the review no longer does the KK justice. The updated metal work, the interlocking lid, the new firebox/charcoal basket, the tile with elastomeric grout... the list goes on and on. It would be nice if one of Dennis's latest creations could make its way to NC (maybe that blue beauty that Chris Lily just cooked on for the Today show) so TNW could update his review and highlight all the improvements made since the last review. Have the "other" guys actually made any changes since then? Heck, maybe TNW could even consider it sponsorship so he can stop all the begging in his next Whizcast And I know what you are thinking, but I don't know TNW and he did not put me up to posting this

Wow. Glad to hear that is wasn't anything more than some burnt hair.

Strange. I figured the comment was concerning that review so I went and checked it out on my own. But there was no comment from LVLasertech at that time. Must have been a caching issue on my side or maybe members get to see comments first. Either way, thanks for the link.

Is there a way to see the comment without having a Instructables login?

Welcome to the club Hitman. I am just a quick sprint up the beltway from you on the other side of the Potomac. As Firemonkey said, the cooker has pretty good wheels on it and will roll pretty easily across relatively smooth surfaces. I am not sure how smooth your slate patio is but if there are any major gaps or unevenness you may want to go the plywood route. I have a concrete paver patio and it can be a bear to move if one of the wheels happens to find itself in one of be depressions where mutliple pavers meet (the pavers have rounded over edges). Just go slow and I am sure you will be fine either way.

Will all the items that come with the Komodo for managing indirect cooking, I am curious what people have generally found to work best. Heat deflector on the charcoal basket or on the lower grill? And does the height difference between the two make a difference in results? With the stainless liner or without? Do you use the drip pan or do you just let drippings fall onto the heat deflector and vaporize for the flavor (I have seen some heat deflector photos in which the deflector looks black and crusty so I assume some are doing this). It looks like mguerra uses a wok filled with lava rocks which I assume gives the same effect. Any other options?

Interesting timing on your post as I just recently (as in yesterday) was experimenting with the sliding of my draft doors. When clean (with 3M scotchbrite), mine slide pretty well, but after a cook they are a little difficult to pull out and require a little jiggling back and forth to move. In my cooker I noticed that the tubes were not perfectly straight (angled slightly out front to back) when viewed from above. So, I used the handle on the spring tensioning tool (that comes with the cooker) to slightly tweak each tube in a little bit. That seems to have helped but I haven't cooked yet so I have no idea whether it will last. I can imagine there is a great deal of movement in the metal down there given the temperature fluctuations.

Great job with the repair. Looks like you should head down to North Carolina and teach Naked Whiz how to use masking tape

Re: Thinking out loud...

Wow I know Dennis is known for taking care of his customers, but this is darn near crazy talk. The timing of this is interesting as I was just messing with this handle the other day. I didn't like how it would unscrew itself if I turned it to the left instead of the right. I decided to use some epoxy between the screw and the wood. Of course, being a new owner, I completely underestimated how hot it got at the draft door and the epoxy quickly burned up. I then tried a high temperature epoxy putty but I haven't cooked on the Komodo since then so I have no idea how it will hold up. Of course, Dennis's solution looks a heck of a lot better.

The anvil I brought with me is 110 pounds. Once I tied the rope to it nothing budged. You will notice that I wrapped the rope around the anvil a bit more than was necessary -- I wasn't going to take any chances with a runaway Komodo.

Trebuchet... hmmm... maybe for getting it onto the deck. Although, I would probably miscalculate and send the cooker flying into my house. I can imagine my house reduced to splinters and the Komodo sitting on top of the pile without a scratch on it. No doubt. I do like to take pictures of "projects" I work on. It is always fun to look back on things you built/did, but in this case, I did probably document the process more than normal. I am glad it wasn't to serve as a warning to people

Recently, I was lucky enough to take ownership of a Komodo, the only catch was I had to pick up the cooker myself. I won't get into specifics but when I say "pick up the the cooker myself", I mean all by myself. So, I set about figuring out how that could be done. I happened to mention what I was planning on doing in another thread and given the negative reaction I received I have to assume no one has done it before, or at least they had the foresight not to mention what they were planning on doing . Either way, I brought my camera along with me and documented the process in case anyone else might be interested. The following process worked for me, but as with anything (especially stuff you see on the internet) your mileage may vary. I don't own a car big enough to haul a Komodo so I made a reservation to rent a minivan. My plan was to lower (or remove) all the seats in the minivan and load the cooker through the rear hatch via a ramp. The ramp was constructed with material I had in my spare lumber pile. Each leg of the ramp was built from two 2x4s laid side-to-side with sections of 1/2 plywood screwed in from the bottom to hold them together. I didn't know how far apart the wheels were so I brought some spare wood that could be used to attach the legs to one another once I figured out the measurements on site. Since I didn't want to spread my attention around too much, I created channels from strips of 1/2 plywood on each ramp leg that would keep the cooker on the ramp while I focused most of my attention on moving the cooker up the ramp. I didn't expect the channels to actually keep the cooker moving in a straight line, but rather to alert me in the event the cooker veered off course. Once everything was put together on site this is what it looked like. I slapped together a less complex ramp to manage the transition from the main ramp to the minivan floor from scraps I brought with me. In hindsight I should have planned something better as this transition turned out to be the most difficult part of the process. To actually move the cooker up the ramp, I rigged up a basic block and tackle arrangement using a couple double pulleys. My anchor point in the car ended up being a rope wrapped around the van's B-pillars. I threaded the rope through the side door hand holds to limit the vertical movement of the rope. On the cooker side of things, I wrapped rope around the cooker top and bottom running a rope between the two to hold the pulley. I let the pulley "float" on the rope so it could adjust as necessary but I don't think it moved from its initial location once things got under way. I don't have any action shots of the process given that I was doing things my myself, but I did bring my anvil along (to function as a rope cleat) so I could stop the cooker mid ramp and back away to take a picture. Pulling the cooker up the ramp went extremely easy. I basically stood directly behind the cooker nudging it with my hip as necessary while I pulled on the rope. The transition between the main ramp and the minivan floor turned out to be the most difficult part simply because the small ramp I slapped together to handle that part was too narrow and a wheel rolled off. I ended up just pulling the small ramp out of place and easing the cooker down. Once in the van I tied it down, loaded the lid and all the junk I brought with me, and was on my way. For unloading the cooker I used the same basic arrangement. Since I had more scrap lumber at my disposal at home I tried something a little different for the transition ramp (small sheet of plywood propped up). I also tied a rope to the cooker so I had a little better control over it as I pulled it onto the ramp from the minivan. My driveway has a slight slope and the minivan floor was not particularly flat so the transition again proved to be the most difficult part. Once the cooker was on the ramp though it came down very easy. Once safely on the ground I put the lid back in place and rolled it to its new home on my patio. Here is what it looks like after I cleaned it up and reattached the lid spring. I was meaning to actually calculate the forces involved in moving the cooker beforehand but never got a round to it. My gut feel was that it wouldn't require anything more than 50 lbs. of pressure on the rope to move the cooker. In practice, it seemed to be less, so I decided to finally dust off my physics & trigonometry textbooks when I got home. I am pretty sure my calculations are right but if anyone who knows better sees an error let me know. To move an object up an incline you simply need to apply more force than gravity is applying down the surface of the incline. The formula for the force down the incline is: mass of object * g * sin(incline angle) In my case, I had an 8ft long ramp with an approximate 2ft rise so sin(incline angle) is 2/8. The cooker bottom with nothing in it weighs 145kg (320 lbs.) so the force is: 145 * 9.81 * .25 => 356 Newtons. The double pulley arrangement gives a 4x mechanical advantage so the force needed on the rope becomes 89 Newtons. Converting Newtons to kg of force involves dividing by g so 89 Newtons equates to 9.1 kg of force or about 20 lbs. The calculations assume all frictionless surfaces so even if you double the force required to account for friction in the pulleys, cooker wheels, etc. you are still talking about a very minimal amount of force required to move the cooker. Given the distance versus force tradeoff inherent with such a pulley arrangement everything happens slowly giving very good control as well. I had a lot of fun moving the cooker and at no time did I feel as though I or the cooker were in danger. Now that the whole moving process is over it is time to start cooking. Although... I do eventually want to move the cooker to my deck (10 feet up from the patio) but for that, I think I will bribe neighbors with BBQ I want to thank Jackie for being so generous with her time and for making the whole adventure possible.