THE UCO FLAT PACK GRILL: PRODUCT REVIEW AND CUSTOM CASE DESIGN

I'll know it when I see it.  That was the mantra that I adopted more than two years ago when I began searching for a portable grill that we could take with us in our 2007 Airstream Interstate.

There's a lot of truth to this meme.  We waited a long time before buying a grill, and there were good reasons for that. 

We had two considerations that most RVers do not have to weigh when choosing a grill.  Number one, there are no external storage spaces in almost all Mercedes Sprinter-based Class B motorhomes.  And who wants to carry a stinky greasy grill inside a very small living space?

If it were not for the decrepit condition of many campgrounds, I wouldn't have purchased any grill at all.  This was my campsite grill at Brazos Bend State Park in 2016.  Notice that all of the rungs for adjusting the grate height had rusted clean off.  It became a giant hassle to prop up the grate by inserting pieces of wood where the rungs once were.  Pieces of wood that would catch fire and periodically fall to the ground, plunging our dinner onto the coals below.  

Number two, a big portion of our outdoor cooking is done under conditions that more closely resemble this scene below than a campground with decrepit amenities.

Remember Crocodile Dundee saying, "Now THAT'S a knife!"
This is me saying, "Now THAT'S a cooking fire!"  

Because one of our primary travel destinations involves this piece of waterfrontage that we have, which comes complete with an infinite supply of firewood, we don't always need a grill per se.  We just need to cook food the old fashioned way, over the open fire.

The fire is almost always burning when we are here, for black fly and mosquito control.  These pics were from 2015 when we crammed all our camping gear into duffel bags, paid excess baggage fees, and flew up north, rather than taking our Airstream.  We had just too many work- and family-related time constraints that year to make the 6,000-mile round trip by road.   

So for those reasons, my grill criteria were as follows:

1. As small as possible (because it will be stored inside the van).
2. Easy to clean (because it will be stored inside the van).
3. Not very expensive (because we won't use it that much). 
4. Able to be encapsulated in a storage case of some sort, such that it wouldn't transmit any residual grease or smoky smell to the inside of our van.

The UCO Flatpack Portable Grill and Firepit spoke up and said to me, "Three out of four ain't bad, especially given that you can create the fourth yourself."  Here's a 3-minute video by James of TheFitRV explaining this product, and it will reveal what I mean by the fourth.

The part that is missing from the product as sold is a robust storage case.  The internet positively howls with despair that UCO's Flatpack Mini grill version comes with a storage case, but the regular-sized product does not (but for $33.73, which was the Amazon Prime price that I paid, I wouldn't necessarily expect a case to be included).

In the series of pics below, I show how I was able to create a durable and semi-waterproof case in about an hour's time.

I used a remnant of an 8-dollar silver tarp that I had purchased last year to create a protective cover for the Yeti cooler we transport on our hitch carrier.  

I do most of my projects visually rather than numerically.  In other words, I fit step by step, rather than measuring.  Such was the case with this tarp scrap.  I first determined how big I wanted the fold-down flap to be, and I chose an existing finished edge of the tarp piece for that flap, to save myself work. 

Then I folded up the bottom around the grill, in order to determine the overall length of the tarp piece.  That "cuff" on the underside of the flap is the first line to be sewn.  

I turned in the side seams as they were the second sewing lines to be completed, but not before matching them in the next step. 

Then I put the side seams against one another, right sides together, before shifting the pins to form single side seams. 

This process essentially amounts to sewing an envelope inside-out.  After those side seams are completed, turn it rightside-out.  

The final step is to sew Velcro strips on the front of the case and the underside of the flap.  

Peek-a-boo!

And voila.  A secure case is thusly made.  Word to the wise:  Always make your cases a bit larger than you think they need to be, just in case you get a post-project idea that you want to add something else in there.  In this case, I decided that I wanted a dedicated set of BBQ tongs to live in there as well.  Fortunately, I had left sufficient room in the design.

You can see how this has excellent potential to be stored in a Class B RV without making a mess of the interior, even if it remains a bit dirty after use.  

Now, you don't have to use plastic tarp for this project, but bear in mind that the grill is made primarily of sheet metal and has a few sharp corners.  Whatever you use in the way of material should be resistant to snags and tears.

OK, so there's the product and there's the the four-out-of-four home-made case that now goes with it, but how does this grill actually function?  How well does it cook?

Fire that sucker up, and we'll see.

I cook with charcoal on average about once per year (until now), so I'm not very good at it.  I often don't have the patience, and thus my inaugural meal was acceptable but I didn't knock it out of the park.

I prefer my BBQ potatoes cooked this way, spiced and buttered and cooked in foil.  

The UCO "Mini" size is said to be suitable for 1 to 2 people, but it would not work for my husband and me.  If I'm going to all the trouble to fire up a grill, I want to cook an entire meal on it.  Meat, potatoes, vegetables, extras, everything.  Above you can see the potatoes wrapped up and ready to go on.

See what I mean?  Smaller would not work for all of this food.

By the way, my hand is on the grill stand to remind me to tell you that you don't need a heat shield underneath.  The stand stays cool enough so that it will not harm a table surface.  I had put this concrete paver there as an initial precaution.

I was too liberal with my use of wood chips during this endeavor, and I had some flare-ups that char-broiled my meal a bit too intensely, as you can see in this photo below.  But that fault was mine, not the UCO's.  It functioned very well.

Meat-a-thon.  Whether grilling on gas or charcoal, I usually throw on additional stuff to put in the fridge so that we can eat it during the week when we are working and too busy to cook.  

Those potatoes are even better than they look.

Do you ever use charcoal only to realize that they only get to their optimal burning condition after you've already completed everything you needed to cook that day?

That would be me.  Next time I'll plan better. 

In closing, the UCO Flat Pack Grill is a great product, and I have only two procedural recommendations over and above what the manufacturer seems to recommend:

1. I shoulda known better, because I've spent decades living in Texas, where we use both clay and cast iron chimineas.  It is never a good idea to set the combusting media right on the bottom of your fire container.  You should always line the bottom with sand or clean gravel or a grate so that the coals or wood or whatever you are burning does not thermally over-stress the structure.  I get the same instinct with this UCO.  Especially given that the bottom of it consists of a piano hinge, my tendency would be to insert a narrow metal secondary grate in order to raise those coals off that hinge just a little bit, to minimize the chances of damaging it over time.  I will procure and cut-to-fit something to do just that, and update this post to show what I mean.
2. In a similar vein, I'm also going to look for some non-polymerized* aluminum foil, to line the base of it.  Such a measure doesn't seem to be strictly needed, but it will make clean-ups faster and easier.  (*A lot of the foils sold today are coated with plastics for non-stick purposes.  That's fine if you're using the foil in a conventional oven at 350 degrees, but with the elevated temperatures in a grill, the plastic can fuse the foil to the grill structure and make a complete mess. 

Future update will go here:

20170327:  Well, here's the first update, but it's not about protecting the bottom of the grill.  It's about storing them - both of them, the original Flat Pack, and I later purchased the Grilliput as well.  The Flat Pack is most suited to campground cooking, while the Grilliput is best for wild-land and less-regulated areas where open fire cooking is permissible.

We have a small inset area beneath our Class B's couch.  It contains a panel that must be removed in order to access water valves during winterization (which we have never done, given our geographic location).  I removed two screws, pierced strips of Velcro with a small scratch awl, put the screws through the Velcro, and re-installed.  Now I have a convenient lashing point for the grill case, with no cabinet modifications required.