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BBQ - 101:
LIGHTING CHARCOAL GRILLS
or
WHY R10 FIDONET ENGINEERS
ARE FAR OUT...
by Ol'WDB

Our subject today is lighting charcoal grills. Two of our favorite charcoal grill lighters are named Mark Luetger, and Joe Jared, (really!!), a couple of computer programmers in the Fidonet 1:103 engineering department.

Each year, Mark and Joe hold a picnic in Mile Square Park, Fountain Valley, Ca. for Region 10 SoCal Fidonet engineers. There they cook hamburgers and hotdogs on a big grill, for the Region 10 Fidonet engineers and their friends and families.

Being engineers, they began looking for practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process as the newspaper + match had failed to do the expected job in a reasonable time. Mark and Joe put their heads to the task of speeding up the process of infighting the charcoal...

"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Mark told me about last years picnic. He said,"Joe borrowed his mates five speed Sassoon cordless hair blower". He continued, "Then we figured out that it would light charcoal faster if we used a vacuum cleaner with the hose in the air exhaust port."

If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) Computer nerds in general, who have their head in a computer or software for it, you already know what is going to happened: A couple of beers later the purpose of the charcoal-lighting shifted from cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.

From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, then an acetylene torch. Then Mark and Joe started using compressed pure oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you recall from chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid combination of oxygen with a reducing agent (the charcoal).

We discovered that a long time ago, somewhere in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in Fidonet's infancy, (or somewhere along those lines). I think it was way back when George Peace was the Fido IC. The Egyptian pyramids were still one of the eight wonders of the world.

By this point, Mark and Joe were having a pretty good time. But in the world of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the mustard. Thus, Mark and Joe hit upon the idea of using - get ready for this Liquid Oxygen

This is the form of oxygen used in rocket engines; it's 295 degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as regular oxygen. In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a live hand grenade into a 50 gallon vat of 150 proof White Lightening.

What followed was the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that, according to Joe, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in, this has to be a world record, 3 seconds.

Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up with a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's something for all of us to ponder NEXT summer as we plan the R10 SoCal picnic!

"Basically, the grill vaporized," said Mark. "We were thinking of using Ol'WDB's Gas BBQ next year... it has wheels and we may get it up to speed in as little as 3 - 4 minutes with automatic lighter, and water sprayer to cool the fast ignition of the meats".

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