After about two weeks of scraping and degreasing, I finally grabbed one of those green scrubbing pads, and after a couple of minutes with a lot of elbow grease, we hit pay dirt. Shiny stainless steel under all the grime. This was quite an encouragement!
I took advantage of the weather outside to really get down to scrubbing the inside. Cleaning and rinsing over the rocks kept the stains off the concrete or grass. The harsh oven cleaners worked quite well, but would have killed the grass.
You can see the rust holes on the side - it looks like someone took a shotgun and blasted it. Each circle has a small hole through the metal in the center.
Another issue we had was junk in between the inside and the outside. You can see the blue propane bottle in the lower left. We used that to heat the lower outside of each of the two sides. When it got hot enough, gooey stuff would bubble out and drip out. I'm not sure what it was, but it was probably grease and smoke mixed. It really stank.
After another weekend of scrubbing the inside, it got to this. This is as clean as it will ever be for me, most likely. One smoke in it and the shiny stainless will be covered with smoke.
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