Hi JFine,
I don't come on this forum very often but it was brought to my attention that this thread had grown in size so I wanted to come on here and check into it also. First I apologize with any issue that you have had with your cooker and we like to thank all of our users that have purchased units directly from us or one of our dealers. We try to build a great cooker at a price that is still affordable and by no means are our cookers over priced for what we produce. We have a few strict rules here with everyone that works for us, 1. try to build the best product for a competitive price and 2. Don't talk bad about any other cookers on the market. We stand by both of those everyday, whether it be myself or one of our fabricators out on the bbq circuit. We also require this of our dealers too. I have seen everything from our pricing, gauge of material used, and finishing process discussed here in this thread (or another recent thread). We believe that we build a quality product for the price, and that our gauge of materials is sufficient as we haven't had any complaints about fireboxes warping or rotting out and also we haven't heard from any of our customers with issues pertaining to rot or rust beyond surface finish.
I didn't know which cooker this was until recently as we didn't directly sell it to you and we don't have registration card on it so it took a little work to figure out exactly who it was. Once I worked with your dealer to figure out the name I was able to track down your email to us and went back over the response by our staff member. The email we received just stated when you bought it, some light chit chatter about a mutual friend and it was asked how to take care of it on a cooker that was purchased over a year before. I read the response that was sent and it just stated a little bit on metal prep and what to use to recoat it and if you needed any further questions answered to contact us anytime, and we never heard anything back. At that time we figured it was sanded down and recoated and everything was all set. If any of our owners have questions or prepurchase questions I have always been there to answer them and I get back to people as fast as I can. We also require the same of our dealer network, get customers questions answered in a timely fashion and be educated about our product line and they are all pretty good about answering any questions.
We are always striving to increase the quality of our cookers and consult with several owners and users before making revision changes to our units. We have put together a team of people both in house, vendors, and manufacturing advisers to see what we can do to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Thank you,
Chad Humphrey
