First Time Poster: Pizza Question..

I just fried the 12 O'clock spot on mine last weekend doing pizza the same way.  Guess I'll hit @RRP up for a Rutland.  I had legs up and the Roswell Rig from Innovations by Chance with pizza stone on top.  Set up is AWESOME (if interested).  It puts the stone about as high in the dome as possible and made for an even cook.  I left the vents open between pizzas and the temp ran away from me and hit close to 700.  Guess thats what did it.  I wouldn't think 450 would hurt a gasket!?!?  

Suffice it to say.... there are many different setups you can use for pizza but over the years I've seen a lot of gaskets fried using platesetter (legs down) and high heat!

While it is the high heat that fries your gas gasket... generally it starts because you have a spot in your gasket that is either missing...shrunken..or most times... it is a place where your dome is misaligned and like water its find a weak spot and runs through it like a screaming hot freight train !!

If you think about it...set your platesetter legs down on your egg and then imagine all of that super high heat hitting the bottom of your platesetter ...and then going sideways toward the wall of your egg and gasket... and I think you can imagine why that puts so much stress on those gaskets!

No matter how you choose to do it I like to have my thermal barrier (whatever it is)...down well below the gasket and then have my pizza stone where my pizza is actually going to be cooked as high in the dome as I can get it!

What I'm trying to get you to visualize is having that high temperature air hit the bottom of whatever your thermal barrier is... (and then go sideways) you want it to hit a wall not your gasket!!!

Ideally what you're looking for is to isolate your pizza stone with   convected air above and below it hopefully at about the same temperature so that you get radiant heat pushing down from the top to the top of the pizza... and heat coming from below that is reasonably close to the same temperature to cook your crust at the same rate.

I hope that makes sense to you!

Legs down. Who needs a gasket? They're over rated.

I run legs up for pizza.  The point is to shield your pizza stone from the direct fire.  Legs up, in my view, let's more air flow around to keep all surfaces hot.   Could be argued the other way also (creating a 1.5" thick surface under the pizza) but that would take long to heat it all up to 500+ degrees throughout.

YMMV, but that's what has worked for me.

Yeah, those high temp cooks destroy the gasket.   I'm still rocking my original one but it is looking a bit long in the tooth.  I'll change to the RRP solution eventually.

Welcome and please feel free to share your cooks!

I read all the fancy cooks and will occasionally share one myself, but don't be shy about posting hot dogs and hamburgers!  There are folks here who will share in that enthusiasm also.   I put up grilled chicken this week...nobody seemed to care.