List Price: $169.99
Sale Price: $163.77
Today's Bonus: 4% Off
If you buy this smoker grill, be prepared for the following. It is not completely bad, but it is typical low quality merchandise from communist China that is only warranted by the manufacturer for 3 months. It is made of thin sheet metal, has misaligned holes, screws that are made of soft asian metal so the heads will definately strip out, missing parts, merchandise arriving in an old, beat up box that is held together with packing tape, substandard parts, poorly fitting parts, wobbly cart, etc. Also be prepared to accept the fact that the life span of this product is at best 3-4 years quite a bit longer though, if you really take good care of it.
The paint on this grill will peel and fall off the first time you heat it up. The thin sheet metal will then be exposed to the elements and it will rust immediately. So, when you buy it, also buy several cans of quality Rustoleum high heat paint. You will literally have to touch it up after every third use or so. This advice isn't just me talking. This comes from the directions that came with it. My advice is to paint the whole thing with a good quality, high heat paint before you ever use it for the first time. Stop the rust before it ever starts.
Something else you should know: The lower grates that the charcoal is supposed to sit on are literally the thickness of spokes on a bicycle wheel. They are extremely thin, cheap wire making up these grates. The whole grill is 36 inches across, but the charcoal grates only cover about 2/3 of this. The charcoal grates came wrapped in a lot of heavy grease to keep them from rusting before they could make the trip across the ocean to the USA. What I did was immediately threw away the lower charcoal grates that came with the grill and got two old grill grates that came out of an old Weber gas grill that was made back in the 1990's. I turned them lengthways and placed them end to end across the bottom of the grill and they fit perfect! Then I went out and bought a 13x9 sheet cake pan and drilled holes all across the bottom and sides and used this as a charcoal tray/basket. If you were to place the hot coals directly on the bottom of the barrel box, it would burn through in no time.
All in all, it is a basic cheap smoker/grill that is really not as bad as I may be making it sound like, but it will require several modifications before you can ever use it for the first time. It will reasonably do a halfway decent job for you, but will last you only a few seasons if you irresponsibly leave it outside in the rain and snow uncovered. If you keep it garaged, cleaned, and maintained it will last quite a bit longer.
Another thing that should be noted. There is absolutely no way of contacting the company that manufactures this grill. None! The name on the grill and the instruction manual that comes with it says Omaha Grills. Yet the manual contains no information on how to contact the manufacturer for replacement parts, warranty concerns, questions, etc. The manual has no address, no telephone number, no website, nothing. I have searched all over the internet trying to locate any business by this name and only one company comes up. They sell only gas grills and have nothing to do with the making of this smoker. I called them and asked. It's as if the company simply does not exist! So you must ask yourself: What sort of manufacturer purposely hides this information and won't even tell you how to find them? Yet they want you to spend your hard earned money buying their product and enriching them? Simply put, if you need replacement parts, be prepared to make them yourself or use spare parts from other grill manufacturers. That's what I had to do.
I specifically bought this particular product because it was the only one of it's kind available on the market. I wanted to use it as a smoker only. I didn't want to buy a barrel type smoker with an offset firebox attached because offsets are too difficult to control temperature. I have much better results when the charcoal is right in the same box with the food. Also, and more importantly, I wanted a traditional barrel type smoker with an old fashioned,"centerport" lid with solid walls on each end of the smoker, not a "clamshell" type lid where the whole upper half of the unit lifts up everytime you raise the lid. Brinkmann's, Char-Grillers, Char-broils, and every other barrel type grill on the market today all have the clamshell type lids. These types lose their smoke and temperature immediately when the lid is opened. I chose this unit because it's the only unit on the market that had the exact features I wanted and was priced less than $150.00. I didn't have much to choose from if I wanted to get these exact features in a smoker.
To save on shipping costs, I went down to my local neighborhood hardware store and asked them if they could get this same smoker? They looked it up in their catalog and found that their supplier offered this same smoker. I had my local hardware store order the smoker and it was delivered to their store on their regular biweekly load free of any delivery charge. So that is a way to save money on shipping charges with this unit.
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