More guts

Ever try cooking a hot dog with a lighter? (Don't). Great grilling starts with even radiant heating.

For Iron Works, that starts with 15,000 BTU of heat per long-life, industrial grade burner. We manufacture our unique, side-fired burners specifically to work with our steel radiant elements – the inverted-V metal parts you see in the picture, each just six inches from its neighbor.

The flames heat these radiants, and the metal spreads the heat along its length. Once hot, the metal itself becomes a radiant heat source – and incandesces to a cozy red glow. Our radiants act as a "heat sink" - a heat storage buffer - absorbing, spreading and maintaining heat evenly. They’re all you really need to do your grilling, but they're also designed to work in concert with lava rock for even more of a good thing. Lava rock adds to the heat sink mass and adds to the effectiveness of our even heating design.

The flare control cooking grate – the upper grate, the one you put your food on – also captures and retains heat. Turn up the fire for those lovely searing marks that shout out to your taste buds. Or turn it down and count on us to spread the heat to where the food is.

We make three kinds of flare control cooking grates.

Our standard stainless steel grates offer long life and easy care. If you do a lot of cooking, or if your cooking is especially demanding, our heavy-duty cast steel grates are just a little better at retaining and spreading heat. Our premium titanium grates are even better, but at a much higher price. We'll be happy to explain the pricing of the grates when you order.

Flare-ups are those bursts of flame that erupt when cooking fats hit a grill’s heat sources. We design all of our grates to help prevent flare-ups and to reduce the size of those that do occur.

We specialize in stainless steel gas grills, but stainless steel isn’t the only metal we offer. Our Designer Series grills use a different steel that’s better suited to their powdered color coatings. And our Signature Series grills combine stainless steel with sheet copper – they’re the only copper grills available anywhere.

Most mass market grills are tubs of cast iron or aluminum. Big, thick metal. So what makes us think our way is better? Plenty!

Shall we start with heat? The grilling cavity’s job is to heat the food. Our metals – and the shapes into which we bend them - do a wonderful job of reflecting heat onto the food for enhanced cooking efficiency. Those big black cast tub grills do a great job of absorbing heat, if not such a great job at reflecting it.

Now, absorbing heat sounds like a good thing to do – after all, the design goal of our radiant elements involves absorbing heat and radiating it out again for more even cooking. But when those tubs absorb all that cooking energy, they radiate a great deal of it into the air surrounding the outside of the grill. And hotter outside air is rarely a requirement during grilling season.

Don’t get us wrong – every grill chamber reflects some heat, stores some and conductively radiates some to the outside. In balance, though, it’s easy to see that we reflect far more to the inner chamber, absorb far less and radiate less to the outside world.

That’s especially true after a few years, when time and the elements are really taking their toll on those other grills. It’s amazing how a few rust holes can really undermine your confidence in a grill! With our metals, we’re far less susceptible to corrosion. (Did we mention our 5-year "nose to toes" warranty?) Where those mass market grills tend to last just a few years, Iron Works Top Grills are designed to endure for decades. Take a look at how we build them on our factory tour page.

It’s not that we mean to disdain our noble competitors – indeed, we salute them for having done so much to boost the popularity of grilling – but frankly, they’re not put together as well as they might be.

For one thing, while we’re fully welded, they use a lot of nuts and bolts and screws. Having a screw loose isn’t the worst of it – did you ever notice that screws and screw holes are often the first points of corrosion? We won’t bore you with the electrochemical science behind that, but we will point out that they have every reason to know better.

One more point. A lot of their grills are put together by amateurs. Oh, their factory people are professional enough, but then they put the parts in a box with a few pages of instructions then leave it to their poor customers to do the best they can at assembling the thing. Top Grills from The Iron Works are shipped fully assembled. Take a look at how a Top Grill compares to a competitor.

Philosophy

As to the rest of our pieces and parts, we’ll trust to your good judgment to recognize that we have a tendency to exercise ours.

We make parts that bear more weight or experience heavier usage out of heavier grades of metal, or reinforce our construction. When we buy components from others, it’s the best we can get, and from higher quality suppliers,