Steel grills are used in many applications, such as refrigerators and shelving. The application that concerns me here is the one that tends to corrode, thin, rust and fairly quickly destroy the steel in the grill. That is the one used in cooking grills and barbecues. The discussion can be applied to all the other grills too.

The normal way to construct a grill today is to weld the thick wires or rods wherever they cross. This is easy and presumably cheap. It is easy to automate the welding, and the grill produced is strong. So what’s the problem?

As usual, I am concerned with what happens after first uses. Welded grills have no simple way to come apart and cleaning rusty, grease covered rods is difficult because there is no good way to reach all the sides of every rod. Even worse is the fact that some of the rods become so badly rusted that they break, destroying the whole grill. However, it seems that the worst corrosion always occurs in the middle of the grill. Sides and ends are relatively unscarred.

I propose that grills be made without welding. I suggest that the rods be held in holes in side bars which are in turn bolted to end bars.

By side bar, I mean flat steel bars, thick enough to have holes drilled in the edge to receive the grill rods. In each bar, there are holes drilled in the ends, all the way through from edge to edge into which a screw can be inserted. The screw is then screwed into the end of an end bar which holds the whole assembly together.

To clean the grill, four screws are removed from the corners, all the rods come apart and can easily be cleaned or replaced. Then the grill can be reassembled as good as new.