Refurbishing an "Ol' Redhead" - Weber Genesis that is

The much older Weber grills featuring a Red Hood or lid are affectionately known amongst grilling\bbq enthusiasts as the Redhead.  I've learned a tremendous amount about grilling\bbqing in the last month or so.

Our 9 year old Charbroil, which should have only been kept or used for a few years finally gave its last flare up!  The burners have long since burned up (likely as metal mercury flavoring in my steaks, yummy) and for the last several weeks I've been "molding" burners from aluminum foil for each cookout, what a pain and waste.  So the search began for used grill to just get us by.  In my searching, researching and ad perusal I'd like to think I became educated on being a better grill consumer.  My research quickly surfaced the Weber brand to be the default must have grill.

Price points seemed high but then again so is a stove\oven, which likely gets used just as much, at least for those of us lucky enough to live in California.  Over several weeks I started searching exclusively for a used Weber and yet still they are not cheap nor easily found.  Seems just like car makers and such Weber has a strong fan-base.  Due to their similar model creation since they started back in the 70's (I think) and high availabilty of parts regardless of model year, people love to hang on to their Webers and fix them up.  For me this was a great sign and confimed my decision to attempt for a Weber purchase.   A few Craig List ads got away from me as when one does show up, it does not last and was always sold before I got a return call.  I continued to scour and crawl listings and to my delight was the first to respond on a pretty "Redhead" Weber Grill still available.  Even luckier is that it was actually still in working condition and was covered much of the time... though clearly still needs work!  We gladly gave the guy his requested $60 for this beauty and hauled it away.  Included he gave us a full propane tank along with genuine grill cover, what a deal!

Seeing as I've been without a grill now for over a week I'm really anxious to get this one cleaned up and fired up.  Thus begins the rehab.

After a couple of days or finding parts and talking to Weber I learned this grill was originally purchased between 1985-1988 and is a Weber Genesis 3 (though a manual I found declares it as a Genesis 3000 Platinum C), what excellent years those were to start with so I how can I go wrong on this one.  I've never done this kind of rebuild but it seemed like a cool thing to do, and hopefully not easy to screw up.  Since they don't make this color or wood slat style anymore, I thought it'd be a cool classic look in the yard.  After researching the current year model it looks like really small differences except for the exteriors.

Ahh a beautiful way to start my Sunday, a cold beer (or three), great sunny day and a few hand tools.


Another beer and some power washing later I'm really happy with how well this one is cleaning up.  Still some work to do with sanding, scraping more layers of 2,000 heat resistant paint, and perhaps another beer!
I completely gutted this thing down and did my best to maintain what I could to keep some costs down.  Even though these are older parts are expensive but U.S made (before Weber started facilitating production out of China) and durable.  With the new Stainless Steel parts on order I can see this grill getting another easy 10-15 years of use with proper maintenance.  Hope to be done in another week or so once the new grates and bars get here.  For now enjoy my redhead fully undressed :P

She's getting some new make-up,  ain't she puuurrty Jethro?