For a guy with two masters degrees, the Professor is pretty handy around the house. Though we are both equal opportunists when it comes to home repair, some times he gets an idea and won’t stop until it’s done.

And somehow when you move into a new house, having a working grill is suddenly TOP PRIORITY. At least it was when we bought our first house. The day that we closed on the property we went to Lowe’s and purchased our very own Weber charcoal grill along with the little chimney that is used for lighting the charcoal. In Chicago, green space is coveted, and your own private yard is a sacred place where cookouts are mandatory.

At the Untitled Ranch (aka House v2.0) in Indianapolis, our wealth of lawn had increased eight-fold, and the same Law of Grill applied. In the back yard stood a rusty old Ducane, mounted on an in-ground post with a gas line, that had obviously not been used in a decade or two. You could tell it was a fairly fancy grill, back in the day. The first weekend we were here, the Professor set out to make it new again.

The first task was scraping and sanding all of the rust and old paint that had begun to flake off. Next, he carefully painted it with two coats of Rustoleum High Heat Protective Enamel in Satin Black. He also spent a decent amount of time cleaning up the cook grids with steel wool, a steel brush, and some standard Bar Keeper’s Friend cleaning powder. Most of the other parts, however, were past their prime and had to be scrapped.

Enter a nifty little website called www.bbqparts.com.

No really. You should click on that ^ ^ ^ link.

Here we were able to purchase everything else we needed including control knobs, hood knobs for the grill lid, a new “La-va-grate”, left and right “S” burners, and all the ceramic briquettes our little hearts desired. The shipping was pretty fast, too.

Now it all looked fine and dandy and I was so overjoyed I immediately invited some friends over for an impromptu cookout. It’s a good thing everyone already had plans because when the Professor went to light the thing barely any gas was coming out of the burners. We could not get it to light! And we were starving. The worst time for things to go wrong is when you are “hangry”.

After doing a bit of research on ye olde google, we soon came to the conclusion that the regulator on our grill is the thing you see in the above photo. One would think a mechanism for regulating the amount of natural gas flowing into one’s grill would be a little more user friendly, with an actual valve lever – apparently not this stone age model. A discussion board on a website about old ducane grills instructed me to use a technique called “loosening the bolt a few turns” followed by another one, “bang on the regulator with something heavy”… and what-do-you-know – it worked! We were back in business and chowing on hot dogs in no time.

Now all the Professor has to do is purchase a cover to shield our shiny grill from the elements. Well there is one more thing: the whole grill leans just a few degrees to the left so that is not level. Fixing this problem might involve consulting the Father-In-Law, who is the all-knowing master of home improvement projects. To be continued…