Grill Boss - I've Changed The Way I Do The Burn

This is another post I wrote sometime in 2023 but never released. Since everything in here is still relevant I figure it might be time to clear it out of the draft que and release it back into the wild.

BTW, I did just update it with a short video now that I've (sort of) figured out how to use YouTube.

OK, Yeah. This, and the next two photos, have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of today's post - Other than the fact that on my way out to The Van today (March 4) to take the real photos for this post I got distracted.

This one was taken with my trusty Canon SX50 with articulating screen so I can see what I'm doing pretty much no matter how the camera is oriented. In this case right down on the ground shooting horizontally with the screen tilted up so I didn't have to lay down on the ground to see what the lens was looking at.

You can see that this camera does a decent job of getting up close.

In case you are having trouble figuring it out, that's the thorax of a bee hanging upside down with its head stuck deep into a blossom and her stinger-end bent for balance.

 This one was taken with my Galaxy A32 phone.

I had to shoot this blind because A) the screen is fixed and was almost facing the ground and B) in sunlight it's difficult to see the screen even when looking straight onto it.

The Galaxy does a fair job of shooting up close but obviously is a little harsh about rendering edges. The depth of field is tight, rendering all except the immediate subject as soft. Something the artist in me likes.

This one, last one I promise, was again taken with the Canon SX50.

I sometimes struggle to get it to focus on the desired subject so I often wish it had a decent manual focus, (Digital cameras in my price-range don't) but with the Canon I do have easy control over the depth of field by selecting an aperture between 3.4 and 8 at a focal length of 24 so if I want to, like here, I can choose, to a degree anyway, how much to soften the background without turning it into amorphous blobs. In this case choosing an aperture that softens the background but still retains enough detail to "read" what's back there.

One last note here. Two days ago that bright green oak in the upper-center-background  was bare-branches covered with probably literally millions of white flowers so tiny that you have to get up very close to see them  (The bees love them and and the tree buzzes constantly for a few weeks as if it's a hive. And if the wind is right you would swear you just walked into a mall and got ninja-spritzed by a minimum-wage olfactory-terrorist wielding deadly perfume.) It's always one of the early trees around here and true to form has exploded into green almost overnight.

Alright, now to get back to what the hell this post is supposed to be about!

This is the single burner stove I have been using for close to twenty years.

This is the stove

I've been using for about four months now. (Actually about 3 years now in 2026)

There wasn't really anything all that wrong with the Coleman, in fact it continues to work just fine, but the impetus for change was all about footprint. 

Here's the Coleman sitting on two sheets of standard printer paper laid side-by-side.

Clearly the stove itself fits just fine with room left over, but that somewhat awkward feeder pipe/angled-gas bottle combination spills over by quite a bit, greatly increasing the practical footprint of the stove.

Here's the Grill Boss sitting on the same two sheets of paper, gas bottle and all. A significant decrease in consumed counter-space.

Setting up/stowing the Grill Boss is a one-handed single-step operation of moving it, gas bottle and all, from storage shelf to counter and back.

But setting up/stowing the Coleman is a two-handed, multi-step operation.

The Coleman stow operation requires first unscrewing the gas-pipe from the stove.

Fortunately, because of the push-valve in the end of this pipe it can be left screwed onto the bottle cutting out one additional step.

Then tucking the Coleman's bottle with attached pipe into the elastic that keeps it in place inside the cupboard, and finally sliding the stove-body onto the shelf.

Retrieval is just the reverse, still a three-step process.

As long as we're talking about gas bottles. Yes, the two different stoves use two different types of gas, and bottles. -- With an exception I'll get to in a moment --

As of right now the 16 oz green propane bottles can be bought for about $5 apiece, or 31.25 cents per oz, while the 8 oz butane bottles run about $3.10 each, or 38.75 cents per oz. Which means using propane saves me 7.5 cents per oz.

I can't deny that the propane route is more cost effective, especially since I refill my own bottles which cuts the propane cost down even more.

But what is the real cost here? Yes, the propane solution is cheaper. But considering the minimal rate I use gas in my stove, (butane bottles last me about a week and a half of several-times-a-day use, propane bottles last a little short of 3 weeks.) is that 7.5 cents really important in the overall picture of my spending?

Much like using up 30 minutes of your time, not to mention the pint of gasoline which I'm going to ignore here, to drive across town and back for fuel that is 2 cents cheaper per gallon in order to save 30 cents on a 15 gallon fill-up, which means you are paying yourself an eye-watering 60 cents per hour, the real-world costs of propane verses butane need to be put into context - because that's where we live - in the real world - - OK, that's where most of us live - -

For me the increased cost per oz. for butane is not much of a factor in my overall financials-over-time picture so isn't worth getting my panties in a wad over considering the other advantages of the Grill Boss, footprint being only one of them.

As for the argument that propane burns hotter than butane - well that may be true, but my own testing shows that either fuel will bring 12 oz of water to a whistling boil in my teapot in about the same 2 minutes and a few seconds, so I don't care.

As for the argument that the butane bottles can be harder to source - yes, that's true, at times, although at other times it's the propane bottles that can be hard to come by, but at the rate of less than one bottle a week and the ability to store 1.5 times more the fuel in the same space I used to store 2 bottles of propane, at least two months worth, I have had no problem keeping myself well stocked by buying when available.

And I still have storage space left over for one propane bottle.

Wait! Why the hell would I do that!

Well, though I try to avoid inside temperatures below freezing out of personal preference, it has happened a couple of times and butane will not vaporize, which is what you need to light the stove, below 30.2F. Propane will vaporize down to about -40F. So I keep a bottle of propane as backup just in case I screw up - climatologicly wise.

Although the Grill Boss is designed primarily for butane, it's actually a dual-fuel stove and ships with the propane adapter hose coiled up inside. (Of course you don't want to leave it there when using the stove!!)

If things get too cold on me the adapter hose screws into the stove's regulator and then onto the propane tank. (If it's below -40 F rendering the propane useless too I'm probably dead anyway so who cares?)

Of course, since the stove runs on vaporized propane and not liquid propane and this hose is flexible you need to ensure that the tank sits vertical or near vertical when using it this way.

Another thing to pay attention to when using the stove with propane is to ensure that the hose connection to the regulator stays tight because the swivel fitting on this end of the hose is a bit snug and when moving the propane tank around  to get it vertical it's easy for the stiff hose-to-knurled knob connection to loosen the seal with the regulator enough that the resulting leak drains the propane tank slowly enough that your nose or even a nearby propane detector won't notice.

Yep - personal experience - - -  

Because of the design of the butane bottle - stove regulator interface, there is no screwing involved with these tanks.

It's just a matter of laying the tank down into the stove's cradle with nozzle pointed towards regulator, then pushing down on a lever on the front panel to pull the bottle forward and seat and lock it into the regulator.

Yes, again, the stove runs on vapor so the tank must be oriented properly, but even that is a no-brainer with this stove.

You see that notch in the rim of the butane tank? You see how it's turned slightly away from the 12 o'clock position here? Well the design of that little spring-latch thingy resting on top of the rim is such that you can't seat the tank into the regulator this way.

 

That can only happen when the notch lines up with the spring-latch thingy. This is done because inside the tank is a short L-shaped pipe with one end hooked to the nozzle and the other bent towards the side of the can. With notch up that means the inside end of the pipe is at the top of the horizontal can where vaporized butane waits.

Oh, and if the temperature control valve on the front of the stove is anywhere other than in the fully off position, the design of the Grill Boss prevents depressing the lever to seat bottle to regulator, preventing unintended accidents.

Another cool thing about that front-panel lever is that it works in reverse too. Flip it up when not actually using the stove and the butane tank is disconnected from the regulator.

Because of the awkwardness I used to just leave the propane tank connected to the Coleman all the time unless I actually stowed the stove for driving. Now, with virtually zero effort, I can be just a little bit safer with regulator and bottle separated unless I'm actually using the stove.

In a couple of the earlier photos of my Coleman stove you may have noticed a makeshift wind-shield made out of aluminum foil.

Without that, in any kind of breeze I had to close the side door of The Van to prevent the flame from blowing out.

The Grill Boss, shown above with my tea-pot sitting on it, which may be hard to decipher if you weren't the one that took and chose this photo, comes with a 360 degree wind-shield already built into it.

For some reason I take particular delight in this last advantage of the Grill Boss over the Coleman. Maybe because lighting the stove is done several times a day which adds up over time, or maybe just because I'm easily amused. 

Lighting the Coleman is a two-handed, multi-step process.

Open the drawer with one hand and retreive the fire-stick, light the fire stick and hold the flame close to the burner with one hand, while turning the valve on with the other hand, drop the fire-stick back into the drawer and close it.

Lighting the Grill Boss is a two step, one-handed process.

It has a built in, battery-less igniter, doing away with the fire-stick altogether and opening the valve and clicking the igniter is done with the same motion of the same hand. So lighting the stove consists of using one hand to flip the lever down to engage bottle with stove, and with the same hand turn the valve until it clicks once than back to wherever I want the flame set to.

All that is why, other than pulling it out for a photo-op for this post, the Coleman has been living on a shelf for the past four months with other unused gear. (2026 edit: which has since all been dropped off at the resale shop on town during our "death cleaning")

Trumped

 OK, that title might be a little harsh. After all it's not Trump's fault that power companies feel like they can successfully ask a GOP run government for exemptions that would allow poisonous runnoff from the coal-ashpits they've been stockpiling for decades and doing nothing about to drain into natural waterways that many downriver communities rely on for drinking water. It's not his fault that development of more sustainable in the long run, potentially less polluting, renewable energy production has been effectively hog-tied. It's not his fault that air-quality standards have been rolled back by over 30% while the EPA's incentive to enforce even those lax standards has been gutted.

Oh wait. Yes it is!

Smartest man in the room my smelly hind end!  No, no -  I need to roll things back a little here. After all, I assume he manages to go to the bathroom all by himself one or two times a day.

But, bathroom or not, that doesn't change the fact that we're talking about a man who said the California wildfires were their own fault because they weren't out there raking up the forest floor and keeping it clean. - Of course that from a man that's never set foot off pavement unless it's on a manicured golf course.

Anywaaay - before I go off on an irrational rant (too late!) -

These are 10" rain gauges.

The central tube is 1/10th the area of the collection funnel which means 1 inch of rain fills the 10 inch tall central tube making measurements accurate to 0.01 inches easy. Once the central tube fills it overflows into the larger outer tube.

I've gone back over 17 years of our records and count 6 times that we've had over 11 inches of rain within a month, requiring a mid-month emptying. (in April 2009 we got over 12 inches in an 8 hour period!) Usually I record the rainfall once a month by removing the collection funnel, lifting the central tube out, dumping it, then decanting any rainwater in the large tube back into the central tube, keeping track of how many times I have to dump the central tube.

When new, the gauge on the right looked like the one on the left. That's what 17 years of sun and polution exposure 15 air miles from a coal-fired power plant looks like. And we are NOT even downwind of the prevailing winds!

Notice I've avoided the question of what my lungs look like after 70+ years of this same human crap. That's because after 12 CT scans over the past 3 years I KNOW what they look like. Surprisingly good concidering that we are such poor stewards of our one and only environment.

Painting Delayed by Weather!

 It was 18° in the 'studio' (cargo trailer) this morning.

Kinda difficult to paint watercolors when the water is hard!

Central Texas Winter

 

This is what

a typical Central Texas winter storm

looks like.

Ice and sleet, very little actual snow - though that has happened a few times in the 50+ years we've been here.

Speaking on years, I had a brand new experiance when out hiking this morning, but it all happened so fast I couldn't get through my winter clothes (it was 24°, wet, and windy this morning and it's still 24° this afternoon) fast enough to grab any photos.

While out near the back fence I heard a crack overhead and jumped back because there were a lot of ice-heavy branches overhead and I wasn't particularly keen on having one come down on my own overhead!

Except it wasn't a branch that came down.

Just a few feet from where I had been standing a turkey-sized vulture thudded to the ground and bounced once from the force of the fall.

I stood there in shock thinking 'what the hell!'.

It lay there on its back in shock thinking 'what the hell!'.

Eventually rolling awkwardly to its feet and hopping/limping away.

Birds don't have a lot of nerves in thier feet, which in cold weather drop down to just above freezing to conserve energy. I figure she was hunkered down up there in that tree minding her own business when I came along and startled her. Then a combination of not knowing where her cold feet were and being top-heavy from an accumulation of ice on her feathers conspired to bring her down in the most ungraceful way possible.

After flapping and slapping her way upright she hopped through the underbrush for a bit trying to get as far from that bastard that knocked her out of the tree as she could while trying to shake off enough ice to get airborn.

I figured I'd caused her enough distress already so left her be and quitely continued on my way, finishing my hike/workout.

Hopefull she got back up in her tree by the time I was sitting down to the breakfast of champions - or maybe that's fools.

It's frigin' cold out here!

Blowout on the Road to Ever After

Other than my grandmother's obit, the oldest of my writings that I can still find. Written sometime in the mid 70's when, to a young and inexperianced mind, it seemed like the world was ending and I was feeling appropriately sorry for myself.

Blowout on the Road to Ever After

Thought the road was clear

Thought the tank was full

Thought we were crusin'

between the lines

Thought we were in high gear

Thought the ring was ours to pull

Thought our forever yours

was forever mine.

Then we had a blowout

on the journey of love.

My world wobbling across the lanes

Life out of control and I'm screamin'

Headin' for the wall, loosin' my brains

and the devil's eye is gleamin'

Things are shredding

Love morphing to bitter rancor

Waste of a wedding

Lost my anchor

We've had a blowout on the journey of love

and there's no spare

Now it's a long walk to nowhere.

A New Display Stand

 

Christmas of 2023 was fast approaching, but, due to cancer treatment issues, I was in no shape to dig out our traditional, and very heavy, decorated tree from its storage nook and drag it to the corner of our room for some much needed, and at the time maybe final, seasonal cheer.

Instead I went poking around some of my model railroad stuff as well as a number of The Wife’s craft bins, all light-weight and managable crap that even the surgically damaged could handle, and we filled that corner with this impromptu display set up on a small folding table.

Only we liked the ambiance it brought to the room so much (I spent many recovery-hours looking into the lighted windows of those buildings letting the posibilities hidden behind those tiny panes take my mind far from the confines of my chair and pain.) that we left it up after the season was over. In fact we left it up for over three years!

But there were logistical issues, a conflict between a table in the corner and the need to access the drawers behind it, and on top of that,  after three years of our less than fastidiousness when it comes to cleaning, it was looking pretty tired and worn.

The tired and worn issue pretty much demanded a refresh. And to address the logistical issues I had the bright idea of building an articulated table using black-iron pipe like the one I put in The Van and talked about here.

After all, same sort of space and access issues, so why reinvent the wheel table all over again?

For the refresh we decided to deal with the dust issue; of which we have plenty between the two of us living together in a relativly small space, a raw concrete floor that constantly sheds a fine, grey powder (we tried sealing it once but it stunk like hell for weeks and wore through almost as quickly), and the side-lights of the back door being open much of the time onto a clay patio backed up by woods; with an acrylic display case that could quickly be dusted off in the evening with the day's dirty sock regardless of what was inside the case.

These cases are surprisingly expensive so we went with a modest 16x12 version, but like several aspects of this project - OK, not just this project but a disconcertingly high percentage of all my projects - all did not work out as planned, so I'll be coming back to that display case shortly.

For The Van’s table I welded the critical joints between fittings and pipe because any rotational movement here would be problematic disasterous. For this project I decided to drill through the fitting/pipe joints and drive a finishing nail into the slightly undersized holes to lock things together.

Yeah - that didn't work at all!

Something I didn't discover until the pipe-support was mounted to the wall and the platform for the display case was mounted to the pipe-support.

Between the relatively soft black-iron pipe and the malleable nature of the nails, things weren't so much locked down as they were flopping all about with a surprising amount of slop.

So the whole damn thing got disassembled in order for me to weld the joints like I should have done in the first place.

Not that my welding has improved any over the years. Damn! That's ugly!

Notice that at this point the pipe-suport is painted black (except where I had to grind it clean to make those abominable welds). Yeah, that didn't work out either.

Once it was mounted against the white, sorry, Bohemian Lace, walls, rather than making the bold statement I was going for, the stark black pipe looked like shit. The fix was a rattle-can white put on right over the black so the piping didn't stand out so starkly against the wall.

Pipe suport modified and taken care of (Not really, but I'll get back to that.) it was time to deal with the platform and the display case it would be supporting.

I needed a way to ensure the display case stayed put on the platform, but also left the top of the platform unencumbered in case we ever wanted to put something directly on the platform without the display case.

My solution was to flush-mount some rare-earth magnets (right now, in the photo above, stuck in a stack to the bottom of my calipers) under the bottom of the display case, then use center-finders (one of which is thete waiting to be used at the end of that green arrow),

to then mark the exact location of matching magnets to be flush mounted in the top of the platform.

The red arrows point to magnets epoxied flush. The green arrows point to aligned holes large enough to pass a 120v plug through, which means there's plenty of room for passing loads of low-voltage wires through for lighting up whatever is inside the display case.

The whole magnet idea was one aspect of the project that worked out like I hoped first time!

The underside of the platform is decked out with:

A power-strip with multible 120V sockets as well as 3 USB 5V outlets.

One Woodland Scenics Light hub (lower left corner) designed for adding interest to model railroads with 4 individually dimable ports. At $20, not hugely expensive, but the various accessories that plug into it are a bit pricy.

Two Evemodel power distribution moduals, each with screw-terminals and 2 different kinds of plug outlets for a total of 28 outputs each. These boards can take an input of anything between 3 & 24 volts, AC or DC and the voltage of the DC output is also configurable. One limitation is that all outputs on a modual are the same voltage, somewhere between 3V and 24V depending on how the modual is configured, but at $14, which includes a supply of pig-tails for both kinds of plugs plus more resistors than a guy could ever use, I can live with not being able to brighten or dim individual outputs.

They are equiped with an adjustable current limiter which is pretty sophisticated stuff for a $14 device. The voltage remains constant but I can dim/brighten LEDs by adjusting the current. And if I really want to have different brightnesses between strings, the resistors can be soldered in series into individual output strings to vary the brightness of each relative to each other if so desired.

One 24V power supply to run the 2 Evemodel moduals. Which can each be indipendently configured for different output voltages.

All of this is mounted to the bottom side of the platform with self-adhesive, ambidextrous (it locks to itself), Double Lock, (similar to Velcro but without the lint-trapping hooks, or debris collecting loops.) for easy removal and replacement as needs evolve.

This also means I can pop the power-distribution modules, all mounted together on a single small board of thier own, off and tilt them to make plugging in various strings of lights without standing upside-down on my head (upper half of photo),  then just snap the whole board back in place (lower half of photo).

While I was messing with the bottom of the platform I glued a string of LED's around the perimeter thinking that they would add a nice glow under the completed project to compliment whatever was in the display case up top.

I was wrong - on or off, there was no visible under-glow.

Fortunately these strings of 20 to 24 fairy-lights, in a variety of whites as well a colors, can be had for slightly less than a $1 per string, and that includes the battery-box with switch - batteries included!

All I have to do is cut the string free of the battery-box and solder a connector on instead. (Paying close attention to polarity! Otherwise there's no light.) I salvage the micro switches for potential future projects and we have more button-batteries laying around than we'll ever be able to use!

Fortunately the fairy-lights I glued to the upper side of the display case base

shine through the foam or tissue-paper we lay down under whatever is to be displayed and provide a nice sparkle.

The sharp-eyed among all y'all (I recently found out that technically y'all is singular and 'all y'all' is plural. Seriously! Look it up.) may have noticed a discrepancy between the platform with the electronics mounted on it and the earlier images of the platform with the magnetic mounting system.

That's because the modestly sized but afordable 16x12 display case we originally bought, shown above, as well as the platform custom designed for it, turned out to be too damn small!

I wanted to build a little camp-site scene around this VW bus, but there clearly wasn't enough room.

Just one more thing that didn't work out as planned.

So we splurged and bought a larger, and ridiculously expensive, 20x16 display case.

Of course this meant I had to start from scratch and build a whole new, larger, platform to accomodate it.

While we were at it we decided to add a skirt around the front and two sides of the new platform to help hide some of the wiring and pipe so we doubled up the thickness of the platform's perimeter for more surface area to attach the skirt.

And once we switched from black to white piping something had to be done about the black cord feeding the power-strip!

I tried painting a small test-patch of the cord with the same paint used on the pipe, but after a week the paint still hadn't cured, so instead we fished out some lightweight white cloth, took the cloth and the power-strip over to the surger (in the other barn), and sewed a white sleeve around the black cord.

Not perfect but it looks better than before (we had to order some white tie-wraps to fasten the cord to the pipe because all we had in stock was a few hundred black tie-wraps.) and all this is pretty much out of sight behind the skirt anyway.

Now we just had to populate the display case.

Running out of time to get too sophisticated, we grabbed the micro-block Peach Tree Garden scene because it is colorfull and already strung with lights.

To get a bit more Christmasy (we just barely got this project done on time for THE DAY) we refurbished one of the trees from the original Christmas display, agitating it in a bucket of soapy water to dislodge the grime, stringing it with new lights and a garland, and chucked that into the case as well.

Of course we couldn't leave well enough alone and ended up populating the 'garden' with a few people, such as Elmer (we knew him as Robert - or Dad in The Wife’s case.) with his inevitable fishing line in the water.

Here it looks like we have a (shady) business deal gone bad and someone ended up getting chucked over the side!

And it looks like Leroy has gotten himself into some mischief again! Don't worry, someone will eventually get him down from that roof.

So there you have it.

One articulating display stand that is easy to keep clean, can easily be swung out of the way of the drawers (we have our printer/scanner in one of those drawers and use it fairly regularly), and clear of the side-light on the door.

Unfortunately - - -

Depending on which way it's positioned, the whole thing has as much as a 4° lean to it. Apparently I wasn’t carefull enough in lining up the pipe-fitting square to each other before welding them in place.

So now I'm going to have to disassemble the whole damn thing and replace some of the pipe with properly aligned bits - eventually -

For now it will have to do because there has been one too many 'damn! that didn't work' moments already with this project!