School Grade Grill

My son is in welding class at school this year.  He is really talented at art and like I said yesterday wants to be country to the bone.  To start the class my son did a smart thing and took a look around and tried to find a project that would be beneficial around the house.  The project he came up with or we brainstormed was a charcoal box/grill.  We like to cook on cast iron alot and usually that means bending down and tending the griddle and oven on the ground.  My son decided to bring the heat up to us instead of us bringing the food to the fire.

What motivates a kid to do things I don't know at all.  I have tried bribery with cash or gifts and none of that seems to work.  Something about country stuff though really gets my son going and this charcoal box/grill really put the fire under him and motivated him.  He spent his lunch periods in the shop class everyday working on this and even had to work with the teacher because he was using so much metal (I told him we would pay whatever we needed to for the materials but he convinced the teacher to let him do it free).

I was a little concerned about how this would turn out because we kind of did the rough measurements in our heads.  Then when he ran into issues he would just text me and I tried to help but how much can you help someone fabricate something over a text message?  Then the cover became an issue because I told him to make it into two so we could add more coals to one side and still use the other side.

Finally when it came to making the base he had all sorts of fun trying to figure out how to make the legs.  Then the legs wobbled so he turned them into "H" style braces and they still wobbled so he had to modify it with a bottom brace.  After all of that we wanted it portable so as you can see in the first picture it breaks down and can fit in most any vehicle.  It does weigh a million pounds so you are not going very far if you are the only one setting this up.

In the end I could not be any more proud of how my son saw how we were cooking on the ground and came up with a solution.  Then he designed and fabricated his project and modified it to work in our parameters.  These kind of skills will take him along way down the road to prosperity in the future and that is something everyone needs to know.  Diabetes is exactly that way, we live with this disease and modify everything around us to live a normal happy life but there still are these parameters we have to force the square peg through the round hole.  Sometimes we need to focus more on the little victories in our daily lives so the huge issue do not seem so bad and depressing.  I can't wait to fire this sucker up and make all sorts of diabetes friendly foods.