I feel like one of the cool kids now!
My FEC100 showed up yesterday at 3:30p central (about 30 minutes late....wouldn't have noticed but I snuck out of work early to meet it!!)
Three of us, my dad, uncle and I loaded it out of the semi, uncrated and put it in our BBQ wagon. Below are some helpful tips that may not interest anyone but me.
1. When measuring to see if it will fit in the truck...I measured the destination...no problem. In the future I would reccomend measuring the opening that it has to pass through to get to the destination. Solution: take the wheels off (which we had planned on doing anyway)
2. Have a woman present when planning for the first fire. Let here read the entire manual and directions. Don't assume that it works like your Traeger does. And don't assume that you'll remember how your Taeger worked the first time either. Problem: I read page 4...it says cook at 300 degrees for an hour to cure the cooker. So I turned it on 300 and waited....finally I knew the fire pot was full but no heat. I turned to page 5. Followed their directions (but didn't clean out the pot)we had us one raging fire in the bottom of the cooker. So much so that the pellets on the slide caught and started a little fire in the auger. Solution: No problem, I "extinguished" the flame and started over. After that it held at 300 like a charm and the wives were none the wiser. It would have helped to have someone with more patience around to read the entire little booklet though before I put the hole truck up in flames.
I have my first cook this weekend for 100 people and out first contest next weekend. So we have a little work to do over the next few days. Looking forward to it.
Here are a couple of pictures....sorry about the size up front.
Picture 1
same picture different view...I think you can see my fire extinguisher in the background.
Picture 2
Chris
WIldcat BBQ
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