Gasket? What gasket?

After several weeks of dithering, I finally removed the charred remains of the gasket from our Small and cleaned off as much of the adhesive residue as I could manage. Then I adjusted the bands to minimize the gap between the base and the dome with no gasket to take up the slop. The best I could manage was somewhere between 1/16" and 1/8" at the back. I didn't try rotating the dome in search of a better fit but that's something else I can try.

I set the Egg up for my standard indirect pizza cook. Wisps of smoke came out through the gap during startup, but it came up to temperature as quickly as ever. The pizzas cooked just as always, which is to say wonderfully. The only difference was that the Egg took a LOT longer to cool off and it burned quite a bit of additional lump in the process. That's something I can live with for now.

I need to come up with a pizza setup for one of the Eggs (we have a Small and a Large) that doesn't incinerate the gasket. I'm convinced that the problem is not so much the temperature as it is the pizza stone and or the indirect piece interrupting the flow of the hot air and directing it against the gasket. But in the meantime, I have my no-gasket pizza cooker to get us through the winter months without a worry.