So it's been a couple of months since I got my fancy new Primo XL smoker, and I have to admit it's AMAZING! I love the consistency it's brought to my cooking. Of course, being the idiot I am, I managed to break it this weekend. (More accurately, I managed to seal it shut!)
I had just finished a cooking marathon the day before (24 hours, 3 different kinds of meat) and the smoker had cooled down. There were bits of meat still clinging to the grill so I decided to fire it up with the coals that were remaining to burn them off. To accomplish this (and here's what I did wrong) I opened BOTH the bottom vent AND the chimney all the way. I then left the grill unattended for 2 hours! At this point I didn't think I had done any thing wrong, and when I came back out to check on it the thermometer only read about 400 degrees F. No big deal, right? Wrong. When I tried to open the lid nothing happened. I tried again (using more force) and nearly picked the 200 pound smoker off it's base! It was sealed shut!
After the initial panic wore off (I thought I had just ruined the brand new smoker I hadn't even had for 3 months yet!) I closed all the vents and decided to let it cool down before doing anything else. I called Jeff (from bbqproshop.com, @bbqpro on twitter) and told him of my idiocy... what I did. He then told me why I shouldn't have opened BOTH vents. The one time he had done that, he hadn't left it unattended and his reached 800 degrees before he noticed how hot it had gotten. I have no idea how high the temperature went in mine. The next day he sent me a link describing almost exactly what I was experiencing: http://www.nakedwhiz.com/ceramicfaq.htm#meltedgasket
The good news is I can fix it! In fact, I've already gotten the lid open! However, when I close it, there's a crackling sound now. Obviously the gasket actually did melt. Now all I need to do is fully remove the gasket from the grill, purchase a replacement, and apply the new gasket... Oh, and never do this stupid thing again.
Hopefully this serves as a tale of warning to new ceramic smoker/grill owners of what not to do. And for those that find this after fusing their smoker shut, it can be fixed and you're not alone... Though there are very few of us. :P
Here are some pictures I took while getting the lid open.
The tool I used was this "Hook Knife" I bought at Menards to scrape out the burned felt. I also used a very thin putty-knife-like tool I found around the house (you can actually see it at the bottom of the second picture) that I used to GENTLY slide between the ceramic after I got the bulk of the felt removed and break the seal.
As you can see, I had to remove the handle to get at the felt.
And here are a few pictures of the burnt felt. It's hard to see in the pictures, but it's not soft and spongy anymore. It's actually brittle and crackles. (Duh, it's burnt!)
