Campfire Rings: Pilot Rock vs. Imitations
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With 56 years of experience, we know what works and what doesn’t when park equipment gets out into the public parks, campgrounds, and your backyard. The foreign knock-offs will try to duplicate a quality product while cutting corners with cheap materials and poor design. We want you to know the differences in quality and safety of our products compared to these cheap knock-offs.
The most recent imitator tried to copy our FSW-30/7/TB campfire ring with the swivel grate. Take a look at this video that will demonstrate the significant and dangerous differences with a comparison below.
Performance
In the video, both of the campfire rings are brand new out of the box and assembled according to the provided instructions. You’ll see that the swivel grate on the imitator does not even clear the side of the fire ring when you try to turn it. The grate scrapes against the top of the ring as it turns. A simple thing when it is new, but this will be a big problem as the fire ring ages.
Since fire rings sit on the ground, they are often subject to vandalism, such as standing or jumping on the grate. You’ll see in the video the cheap imitation is easily destroyed and made useless. The Pilot Rock swivel grate can withstand much more punishment and still operate.
Materials
The import uses steel plate that is only 0.140 inches thick for the ring. Pilot Rock uses steel plate that is 0.178 inches thick. That may not seem like much difference, but the Pilot Rock steel is more than 27% thicker – a visually noticeable difference, and one that affects the durability of the fire ring.
The Pilot Rock cooking grate is made using 0.5-inch thick solid steel bars, welded together on both sides. The imitator uses much smaller bars that make the grate more susceptible to vandalism.
Safety
To operate the grate on the imported copy, the handle moves over the fire which will get too hot and dangerous to handle. On the Pilot Rock FSW Series swivel grate ring, the operating handle is never over the fire. The grate will swing 180º, but the handle is built to never swivel directly over the fire.
We know the imitation fire rings use cheaper materials, therefore are less expensive to buy. However, if you have to replace them just once, your budget has taken a hit that you wouldn’t experience using a quality Pilot Rock fire ring. Our fire rings also come with a 5 year manufacturer’s warranty. So when you’re shopping for new fire rings, make sure to remember the differences between an imitator & a quality fire ring.