Blankton

I did have the thought that it could be a fake, but it came from John Lewis as far as I know. It was a birthday present from my mum, but I was renovating the house at the time, so it was stored unopened in a spare room in the box for about a year. This was why I didn't originally complain, because the receipt would have shown it was a year old, even though I hadn't used it. The white stuff is ash. I'm pretty sure it's mild steel, but I can confirm that. Ironically I'm a metallurgist working predominantly with high temperature metals. Ash is well known to be very aggressive in terms of hot corrosion (think volcanic ash cloud) and a lot of historic knowledge on this stuff comes from places like the coal board and power station operators. To me it looks like a textbook case of it being made from an unsuitable material and the design having been updated to a suitable material (stainless steel). But, I am surprised that there aren't lots of people having the same moan on the internet, if Weber had of made a lot of ash catchers to this specification.

Hi. I have a Weber master-touch BBQ. The second or third time I used it the ash catcher seemed to oxidise leaving a small hole. The metal was paper thin around this. Being fairly lazy I didn't do anything about it and the hole got bigger. This was a couple of years ago, I've now decided that the escaping ash on the patio has reached annoyance levels and went to buy a replacement...... I've now realised that this is fifty quids worth of ash catcher (if you can find any in stock) and I'm a bit more narked about it failing so soon. What's more, all the replacements seem to be made of stainless steel, whereas the one that came with my BBQ was painted mild steel. It seems to me that this was made out of the wrong material on my BBQ and has now been corrected, with replacements being made of stainless steel. What has surprised me is that when I Google the part, I don't see anyone else having had this problem. I would be interested to know if anyone else has had something like this happen.