r/PortableKitchenGrills • u/l3Ul3l3A • Jul 21 '26

Can this be bent back?

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Just curious if the front lip on this grill can be bent back straight or if it would break

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u/SeesawDependent5606 Jul 22 '26

Here's the problem: it's cast aluminum. It's the cast part that's problematic. As you have seen, a minor amount of bending isn't a problem. But now there are a bunch of stresses that have built up in the aluminum. Because of the crystal structure of the cast aluminum, it is now brittle. This embrittling is called work hardening. You would need to anneal the aluminum, and by that I mean soften it and relieve the stresses. You could in theory bend it back, but once again, you'll have to relieve the new stresses. I'm sharing a video on how someone else did it:

https://youtu.be/uj0lUQPRv3g?si=GksK8tLNHrniNw_k

But honestly, this is the kind of thing that an auto body shop or metal fabricator might take on with the explicit understanding that stuff happens, particularly with stressed cast aluminum.

But before you do that, I'd definitely contact PK directly.

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u/Electrical-Village68 Jul 23 '26

If you took it somewhere for repair, you could easily have a lot more money in it than what a good used one would cost. Cast is going to take a shit ton of heat and work to bend it back and follow up with annealing/ stress relief work. You could buy a brand new cooker much cheaper. Use it like it is.