The Dude Cauldron

1)   SUSPENDED BASIN DESIGN A Cowboy Cauldron basin is suspended in the air. This is amazing for lots of reasons. First, you can get your feet right up underneath the fire on a cold day. Niiice… Try doing that with a fire pit! Second, unlike a ground fire, the smoke from a Cauldron is already on its way up and away from you by the time it leaves the rim of the basin. We love wood smoke, but hey. A little is great, but a face-full is too much! The Cauldron is better than a ground fire, or anything that sits on the ground, by a long, long shot. Sit by one for an hour, and every other fire feature you ever sit next to for the rest of your life will make you wish you were sitting by a Cowboy Cauldron.

2)   ADJUSTABLE BASIN HEIGHT Your life isn’t static, and neither is your Cauldron. If you change your outdoor furniture, you can adjust the basin so that your view of the fire remains perfect. If you want to raise the basin for grilling, go for it. If you take it to the beach and want it low, low, low, then put it there. No other fire pit or grill on the market does this.

3)   SIMPLE, NO TOOLS SET UP AND TAKE DOWN. The Cauldron has been designed to be perfectly functional. Only a single cap pin holds the entire assembly together. You can take a Cauldron down and move it in seconds. And simple? Seriously, if you can’t figure out how to set up a Cauldron just by looking at the parts, you probably should re-evaluate the notion of being around real fire in the first place.

4)   SOLID, SEAMLESS, PLATE STEEL BASIN CONSTRUCTION Plate steel. You read it right. Army tanks are made of the same stuff (albeit the metal they are made from is thicker). Impervious to thermal shock, weather, or abuse of really any kind, with no seams to crack, weaken, or look at. And the thickness of our steel means that your basin will heat up slowly and dissipate heat evenly. We don’t make Cauldrons from cast iron. Cast iron is heavy, rusts quickly, and will break if dropped. If you are thinking about buying a cast iron fire pit of any kind, don’t. Please. Even if you don’t buy a Cauldron, don’t buy a cast iron fire pit. You will regret it. If you need cast iron in your life, buy one of our Butter Pat Industries cast iron pans. They are perfect. So are our Cauldrons.

5)   GRILL DESIGN If you cook, then you know it’s all about heat control. Our grills went through seven separate design iterations, and like every other part of a Cauldron, they work perfectly. The hinged design allows you to add fuel, move coals, and even remove or adjust the interior racks without ever having to remove the grill. Makes cooking safe and easy. We like that – “Safe & Easy.” Has a nice ring to it. You’ll like it, too.

6)   SECURABLE RAIN & SNOW COVER There are lots of fire pits out there. Go ahead. Check them out. One thing you will immediately see is that almost none have covers. People like cooking with Cauldrons, but nobody likes ash soup. If you buy another fire pit, you will either learn to love ash soup or you will have to make yourself a cover. Best of luck with that. If, on the other hand, you buy a Cauldron, you will get a cover that is lightweight, (safe for use while wearing flip-flops) rigid, waterproof, sun-proof, and has our logo on one side so that if you love your Cauldron the way most of our customers do, you can proudly (but subtly, it’s black-on-black) let people know what the amazing thing in your yard is. Oh yeah, our covers also have clips that keep them from blowing away in a squall, for you folks who live in windy areas.

7)   FINISH Your Cauldron is going to outlast you. No matter how rigorous your diet or workout regimen is, you are probably going to die before your Cauldron does. We make them to last. A part of this effort is our finishes. Because of their size and the amount of abuse Cauldrons are subject to, no finish is perfect, but we do everything that we can. The frames are zinc treated and then powder coated with extremely durable outdoor grade coating. The basins are given an even more technical high-temperature coating that can withstand the thermal expansion of the basin during a burn. Will the finish outlast you? Maybe, maybe not. If you live on the ocean, work out religiously, and eat only veggies, your finish might fail before you do. In that case, we recommend putting a coat of our Bear Fat on your basin every so often, to give it the extra love and protection it deserves.

8)   LARGE BASIN SIZES Cauldrons are big. By design. We make our basins out of thick plate steel for lots of reasons. Here are just a few:

9)   Slow thermal curve. Cauldron basins take a while to heat up, and radiate heat very efficiently. Why is this important? Because a thin piece of metal can get really, really hot, really, really fast. Can you say nasty burns? Even a small fire can heat up thin metal so much that grazing it with your skin results in an instant second-degree burn. Not so with our Cauldrons. If you are burning a fire so big that the Cauldron will be too hot to touch, you are going to already know not to touch it.

10)   Capacity. Logs are big. You don’t want to have to cut them up just to watch them burn. A Cauldron will eat a log like you eat lunch. No need to mess around with saws and other nasty, biting implements.

11)   Surface Area. There is lots of surface area on a Cauldron. This means rapid and even heat dissipation, and it also means that when you are cooking you have tons of space on which to work. This is critical, as anyone who cooks on live fire knows. If you don’t cook on live fire now, you probably will once you own a Cauldron.

12)   Stability. The weight of a Cauldron basin holds the apparatus to the ground, and makes the overall unit safe to be around. This enables us to design our simple, no-tools frame, which makes Cauldrons that much better than everything else out there.

13)   REMOVABLE TWO-PIECE INTERIOR GRATES Cauldrons can generate lots of heat. In fact, they are designed so that heat reflects inward to drive full and efficient combustion of the fuel inside them. Because of this, our interior grates absorb lots of thermal abuse. The two-piece design allows the support structure to move independently of the thinner charcoal grate. Both pieces will warp at separate rates. Being able to flip the support piece over periodically will keep it from sagging, and the charcoal grate can be added or not as you see fit. When cooking with wood or just using the Cauldron as a fire pit, pull both of the grate pieces out, as the fire is designed to burn most efficiently on the bottom of the basin. They are not there to hold wood up for air flow. When cooking with charcoal, the grates will hold the heat from the coals up high near the grill, where it is most effective.

14)   SOLID STEEL BASIN BARS The bail (handle) of the Cauldron basin is made from solid steel bar. It isn’t hollow, or thin, to save money. In fact, solid steel bar at least 3/4” thick is the way we design our products to make them absolutely impervious to whatever you or your buddies decide to do with (or to) your Cauldron. Our products aren’t cheap, but they are absolutely the best that you can buy.

15)   LASER-CUT TRIPOD CAP We want your Cauldron to work, and to keep on working. We also don’t mind if folks hanging around them know who we are. Consequently, we cut our name and logo right into the steel with high-tech lasers so that over time, (lots of time) the name and logo stay in place, looking cool. No epoxy bonds that might melt, no silly nameplates to come off or stick out. Just a permanent identifier that will let folks know you were smart enough to buy a great product.

16)   WELDED FOOT PADS Cauldrons tend to move around, just like you do. We want to be sure that whatever deck surface you might end up setting your Cauldron on will be protected from scratching. We take the time and expense to cut elliptical foot pads that spread the contact area of the tripod leg over several square inches, eliminating any chance that bumping the frame might mar your kick-ass deck. Or your buddy’s deck. Trust us, you will be asked to bring the Cauldron with you.

17)   SINGLE-POINT SUSPENSION The Cauldron’s design is timeless. Although it might not look like it at first glance, lots and lots of design revisions have gone into the products we now so proudly sell. We’ve seen lots of attempts to fix something that isn’t broken. Fire pits with multiple contact points absolutely kill the aesthetics of the thing. If you’ve read all the way to here, you now get the best piece of information of all: Cauldrons swing when they burn.  Just barely perceptively, but they move. And it’s awesome. If you think a fire is hypnotizing, try one swinging like a pendulum. And it’s a Cowboy Cauldron so if you want to, give it a bit of a kick. You aren’t going to hurt anything. Pendulum = Good, Fire = Good,  Pendulum + Fire = Awesome