Bar-B-Que Heat Plate Materials

A. Hi, Rudy. There are hundreds if not thousands of different stainless steels, and some are far more expensive and corrosion resistant than others, but none are dangerous. Rust is not generally dangerous either, and certainly not in the context of being on a B-B-Q flame shield. Aluminum may not be able to take the heat though, and it is impossible to clean.

opinion! I guess we have to focus on things that we think we can control. But it still amazes me that in an age where our government has abandoned any pretense of control over the food supply, where rodent hair is in most spices, where we feed the chickens newspaper & excrement, where we grind sheep brains into the cattle feed, where we import non-inspected vegetables grown next to latrines in every filthy 3rd-world hovel, where rodent droppings are everywhere and poisonous adulterants deliberately added in China ... we then mix it all into 100,000 gallon tanks, shuffling it all inextricably together so it takes weeks or months of ongoing food poisoning to track down the source of salmonella, listeria, and e coli outbreaks -- but people are concerned about the safety of the metal that might wear off their forks and bar-b-q grills rather than what we're actually eating :-)

Good luck, and Regards,

A. Aluminum will not work!
If you make your own out of SS, I think that you will have more than $60.00 invested by the time that you are thru.

I think that if you filed for both types of replacement parts at the same time, then you have a right to complain about the second $30. If they were filed at different times or on different requests, then you have no complaint.

Be sure to not buy the same brand when you trash can the current one.

A. Why not ask why the rust is occurring? I live in central NY, and leave my grill out all year long. I cover it after every use. In the summer I roll it over into a shaded area so temp changes don't create condensation under the cover. I paid $125.00 for it 6 years ago and it still looks great. The cover cost me about $25.00.

A. Hi Erez. I'm no metallurgist, but I always thought that unrelieved stresses from machining, welding, etc. were the cause of warping. If these are welded grates, they probably require stress relief; warpage might occur anyway as fires can get the steel red hot, and consequently soft.

My understanding is that there really is no such thing as ST-37 anymore -- that this was was just a precursor numbering system from decades ago to what we now call ST-37-2. I don't think it has much bearing on the warpage issue. Good luck.

Regards,

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A. Hi Rebecca. I think you probably realize that the problem here is that the engineer who was trying to work out how best to design that refrigerator door wasn't thinking much about the possibility that someone might cut it up and use it as heat shields on a gas barbecue, and no epidemiologists are traveling around gathering data on the safety of old refrigerator doors being used as heat shields either. So you're pretty much on your own, and the general safety principle is don't use stuff for purposes for which it wasn't intended.

All that being said, I personally think most of the paint will burn off pretty quickly and you can just break them in with no food on the grill. However, unless that refrigerator is older than dirt, it would surprise me if the sheet metal was thick enough for use as a heat shield without badly warping and burning/corroding through very quickly, whereas you can usually get a set of stainless steel or porcelained heat shields for under $20. Good luck!

Regards,