The BBQ

It all started, as these things often do, with the casual announcement: “We’ll have a BBQ for the Bank Holiday. A few friends from the motor trade, a few colleagues. Nothing fancy.”

Of course, “nothing fancy” in my world rarely stays that way. I could have wandered down to B&Q and come back with a flimsy tin box with three spindly legs, guaranteed to collapse under the weight of a half‑cooked burger. But no – that would offend every fibre of my engineering brain. If I was going to do this, I’d do it properly.

And there was another factor – motor trade people are notoriously unreliable. If you invite them for a BBQ, you could end up with 30 attendees or 3. You plan for 3, you’ll get 30. You plan for 30, you’ll get 3 and a dog. So the BBQ had to be big enough to cope with the maximum, just in case the entire trade turned up with a plus‑one and an appetite.

That’s how I ended up staring at an empty 208‑litre Castrol drum – gifted by the Ford dealership up the road, where I know the General Manager. A proper drum, the sort that once held enough oil to service half of Bristol. It practically whispered, “I could be a BBQ.”

It wasn’t my first brush with the concept either. Back in my seafaring days, the engineers would hack an oil drum in half, scrounge some angle iron and engine‑room plating, and before you knew it, there’d be a BBQ big enough to feed the entire crew. Never harmed anyone, despite all the scare stories you now hear about oil drums and toxicity.

The very first job was obvious: burn it out. Before there was a stand, before there was any talk of a griddle, there was a ceremonial inferno. A towering pile of logs and scrap went into that drum to strip oil residue, fry off any lining, and blister the paint like an overdone crème brûlée. The neighbours muttered darkly, DEFRA probably circled me on a list, but by the end, the inside was clean and ready for business.

The “fire floor” was another bit of scavenging genius. I’d found some corrugated cladding at work – thick, galvanised stuff. Perfect for holding logs off the base, but it had to go through the baptism of fire first: the same burn that cleaned the drum stripped off its paint, and then I took a grinder with a wire brush to remove the last of the galvanising until it was honest bare steel.

A neighbour donated some old oven shelves, which I welded together into a single griddle, but it was more suited to casserole dishes than lumps of meat. Instead, I blagged some rusty chicken grating from the fabricator up the road, which was perfect for a main cooking area and a shelf for keeping food warm.

A piece of old, mild steel created a burger frying area on the left. A quick blast with the sandblaster will remove the surface rust.

Then came the legs. Oh, the legs. There were sketches. There were calculations. There were even a few muttered lectures – from myself to myself – about the geometry of X‑frames. Should the cross point sit at the drum’s bottom, below it, or somewhere near a ley line aligned with the Equinox?

Dozens of measurements later – each one claimed to be “final” – I did what any sensible fabricator would have done in the first place. I guessed.

And the guess worked.

I welded up two sturdy X‑frames from 20 mm box section – leftovers from bracing the GT6 tub. Added a cross brace, and suddenly the frame looked less like a BBQ stand and more like something Robot Wars rejected for being too overbuilt. Collapsible? No. Stable? Absolutely – you could park a forklift on it.

The clever bit, if I say so myself, was the mounting. No ugly bolts or spindly brackets – just neat little welded stubs that let the drum drop on like it was made for it. The griddle? A free offcut from the local fabricator. The VHT black paint was left over from the Mazda MX‑5 engine rebuild.

And the tabletop? Well, I didn’t like the idea of this rather handsome oil‑drum stand sitting in the garden rotting between BBQs – so I dug out a sheet of 12mm plywood that had been sulking in my garage for over a year. A quick cut, a bit of varnish, and the BBQ stand suddenly became an occasional table for occasional use – proof that even industrial scrap can scrub up nicely for polite company.

In fact, the only things I actually bought were the hinges. Everything else was begged, borrowed, scavenged or unearthed from the archaeological layers of my workshop.

By the time I stood back and looked at it, what I had wasn’t just a BBQ – it was a monument. A Castrol drum reborn, sitting proudly on GT6 box‑section legs, ready to feed a crowd – or just three – without ever looking like it was bought in the seasonal aisle.

So when my friends from the motor trade turn up for the August Bank Holiday, they won’t find a wobbly grill from a garden centre. They’ll find the BBQ to end all BBQs – forged from leftovers, built for anything, and moonlighting as a table when it’s not cooking.

And when someone inevitably asks, “Why didn’t you just buy one?”, I’ll hand over a perfectly charred burger, rest my pint on the table top, and say: “Because this one won’t blow over in the wind, Mike. And because I could.”

Bet it's bucketing down at the Bank Holiday.