My XL Egg is not cracked, BUT!!!

I posted the other day that I thought my XL might have a cracked base because there was smoke coming from under the egg and grease dripping off the bottom.  I took a bunch of pics and went to see my dealer.  He said he would get in touch with BGE and get back to me.

He suggested that I remove the all of the pieces from the egg and  heat some water to just short of boiling and pour it in the egg to see if it leaked out.  The hot water would dissolve any grease in the crack enough to see it leak.  Did that and nothing.

But while I had the fire box ring out I noticed in one area in the back of the ring that there was grease cooked pretty heavily on the side between the ring and the inside wall of the exterior of the egg.  None on the egg wall, just the fire box ring.

Because my egg is on a portion of my outdoor space that goes down to the pool there is a slight tilt to the floor to allow water run-off.  My guess is that the grease from lo-slo cooks has been settling back there.

He forwarded the pics to the area BGE rep and called me back today.  The rep suggested that a combination of Florida humidity and moisture combined with the grease puddling had soaked into the ceramics of the egg base.

Told me to load it up with charcoal, fire it up as high as it would go and burn out the egg and the corresponding moisture/grease build up.  It is sitting at 650 and going up.  Has been smoking like crazy out the bottom and I can see new grease drops forming and falling off.

I  plan to just let this keep going until the bottom appears to have quit the process.

Next step will be to build some sort of ramp for the back wheels of the table to take the 1to 1.5 inch tilt out of the table.

By the time this is done I should either have a super clean egg or the damn base will crack.  Either way I am covered because I doing just what the BGE rep told me to.

As an aside, I was lucky to choose a very customer supportive dealer.  Yesterday when I was there and talking with the owner I mentioned that I had been to another dealer location to do a little rub shopping.  That dealer is located in a meat market and carries a selection of rubs that fill up two walls of their store.  They are a very aggressive dealer with their pricing and I think I was told that they sell more eggs than any dealer in FL.  I saw that they had the Mini-Max priced at $499.   My dealer was at $599.  So we discussed that a bit and he said they were getting ready to have a 10% off sale on eggs.  Still higher than $499.

When we talked on the phone today he said to let him know if I wanted the MM and he would cut me a deal.  I think I may talk to him about that when I get this XL issue resolved.

It is nice to confirm that I am hooked up with a good dealer after reading some of the issues others have posted about theirs.