Having a garden grill with tasty hotdogs and burger patties sizzling on the grill is the perfect American way to host a casual get-together where people congregate as much for the company as for the food.
In fact, even company executives sometimes host grill parties in their backyard for employees as part of a team-building effort.
A BBQ grill picnic is one of those rare occasions when one can dress in a shirt and shorts while holding a conversation with a company CEO or vice-president. Match this with a swimming pool and kids playing and it’s a great and simple way to relax and have fun. Unless you’re the one who’s grilling.
Watch the video of this grilling machine below.
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Video credit: Rumble
Some people enjoy the act of grilling the food and that’s fine but if you’re doing it just to keep people fed but really want to be part of the conversation, then getting stuck on the grill may not really be the most enjoyable part of the picnic. You could always hold a conversation, of course, but you run the risk of over- or under-cooking the food.
And one frustrating thing is that just when you thought you were done, another bunch of people arrive and you need to grill even more food in an unending cycle until you’re too exhausted to even talk anymore.
For one woodworker named Matt Thompson, he decided to take the hassle out of grilling by using his 30-year woodworking and engineering expertise to create a Rube Goldberg machine so that it can not only grill hotdogs but cover them in mustard as well.
If you’re wondering what a Rube Goldberg machine is, it was named after cartoonist Rube Goldberg and refers to a machine that intentionally built to perform a simple task in a roundabout and complicated way.
The 50-year-old Matt needed six months to build his hotdog grilling machine that you activate with just the tap of one foot. You get the perfectly grilled sausage in six minutes with a line of mustard once it’s done. It also serves as a vendo machine of sorts, keeping cans chilled and serving one up when needed.
Matt said: “It’s important to me that everything really does work.
“So, I knew that the hot dogs would need to be on the grill for at least five to six minutes at medium heat.
“I actually had to double the number of crossbars on the grill so that the hot dogs would roll and not get wedged by the rolling arms.
“Having said all of that, the dogs cook perfectly!”
The biggest hurdle was getting the grilling arms to spin no faster than one revolution per minute.
Matt said: “That allows the hot dog to cook just right.
“The hot dog dispenser was a little challenging as well.
“I initially tried to operate a push pump condiment dispenser to squirt the mustard on the dog but when I couldn’t get that to work, I used an electric peristaltic pump with a button at the top of the handle to activate it.”
Replaced!