This a Blog for Type 1 diabetics, Campers, outdoor enthusiasts with diabetes and all sorts of stuff for anyone that likes to be outdoors. I have lots of Product reviews for outdoor diabetics, Suggestions for Diabetics, and fun diabetic items.
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.
When I first heard and saw people using YouTube I was thinking who in the world is going to watch 30 second clips of people acting dumb. Now several years later I must admit that YouTube has saved my life and taught me a thing or two. I have found clips on how to repair my trucks window regulator, hunt wild hogs, and how to use electrolysis.
I have been telling all of you lately of my current obsession with buying cast iron on the cheap and trying to clean and rehab it to new like conditions. Now this has been lots of elbow grease and my wife wondering when I will go to bed and stop scraping skillets.
With my new method of cleaning, I can stop the scrubbing, and oiling and just put the iron in the 5 gallon bucket with some sodium carbonate and hook up the battery charger and presto! In lots of time depending on the carbon and rust factor you have bare metal clean cast iron.
Watching all of these videos I learned an important part of electrolysis and that is to buy a "Manual" battery charger. Very important because all the new chargers that have the jump battery built into them are automatic charges. I picked the charger above from "Big Lots" for 50 bucks and it was 20% off sunday so that made it 40 dollars. That is a deal on a 2-10-50 amp manual charger.
I forgot to get a before picture of the pan above. This is after 2 hours in the electro-cooker. Once you remove the metal from the science experiment you have to take a scrub brush and get the loose carbon and rust off of the pan.
Before I put the pan in the solution I didn't even know it had this no. 5 and 81/2 IN. stamp on the bottom.
Here is a shot of the inside part. This skillet is probably 50 to 75 years old at least. You can tell a little on the age if they have a ring on the bottom. The ring was on skillets during the days when people cooked on wood stoves. The skillet has a nice flat and smooth as butter feel to the metal. I would put this in the crepe making department in my pantry.
It is hard to tell the difference in collor. The skillet on the right is the one I just used electrolysis on and has a silvery metalic look to the pan. The skillet on the left is one I picked up about two months ago and heat cleaned the rust off. Once I dried the electrolysis pan it instantly started to surface rust. I pulled out the bottle of veggie oil and sealed it real quick to stop this from going any further.
All of this started when my wife wanted me to pick up an extra set of cast iron to use at our house. We have one set at our cabin and now miss it at our house. Me being the cheap person wanted to buy used and found lots of rusty gold. I had heard of alternative methods of cleaning cast iron and came across the video earlier in this post. Now I have volunteered to teach a cast iron cooking class and have learned mountains of information about cast iron and how to care and restore it. The internet is our friend!
