I have had a very disappointing experience with my CC and am wondering if others have had the same experience. Below is an edited letter I wrote to Trevor and Capital, in March. I will post an update afterwards.

" It is with great sadness that I am writing to you about problems I am having with my Culinarian.
I first saw Capital stoves at the Chicago Kitchen and Bath Expo in 2006 and knew that it was the one I wanted.
After all these years of waiting, I finally own one. However, it has been a disappointment from the beginning:

I ordered my stove and vent from Eurostoves: Mr. Lawson had an easy sale because I knew what I wanted. He advised me on a vent and we purchased one based on his recommendations. It took over 2 months to finally receive my stove and I believe I received the wrong one from the start:

The vent we needed required a remote fan, yet the vent we received had 2 internal motors mounted inside which we had to remove and then reposition a metal plate. I still have these motors and am unsure what to do with them. The switch was also wired for these internal motors. The roof mounted blower came with a more substantial switch which we had to install on the hood. We did this work ourselves.
The ovens and griddle are not cooking properly. We operate on liquid propane and I don't think our stove was set up for it: Mr. Waymire sent 3 new orifices plus manifolds for the griddle and small oven. We replaced all and the small oven cooks moderately better, but the griddle does not maintain its temperature. I sent Mr. Waymire an email regarding this but have not heard back. It should not take 1/2 hour to cook pancakes!!!
The convection does not seem to be working. I have limited experience with convection cooking, but whenever I use this feature, I get very uneven browning, and this is using only one sheet pan in the center of the oven. I can feel the air circulate while the fan is on and it seems like there is more air movement to the left side of the stove.

The broiler does not broil evenly. The food was brown on one side and totally uncooked on another.
The rolling racks do not work well. One has to keep a very straight path or they can get jammed in and become difficult to realign. I can push the rack in all the way and there is enough play in it to have the front roller completely off the side of the oven. Is this a poor design or just shoddy workmanship?

Minor annoyances: I had to receive a replacement grate already due to the "indestructible" finish popping off while cooking. This was not due to rapid temperature change. Also,the grates sit flush with the surface on the left side of the range top, yet are above the surface by almost 1/4" on the right hand side.

The burners on the right hand side also have a 3/10" gap on the side, which does not seem like much until you consider that they slide around and the rails underneath slide around. This is important because the drip pan below does not extend all the way to the right and crap can fall into no-man's land: clean-up of this area is impossible.

Considering the drip pans: why do they slide around in the tray left to right? Couldn't they have been made 1/2" wider to cover the whole tray? One selling point was how easy these stoves are to clean. By having the drip pan fit so loosely, one has much more to clean.

I am not some weekend cook. Sometimes I cook all day long: we garden, I can our produce, and I cook from scratch most everything we eat. Last night alone I had 5 burners going, the small oven, and the broiler (chicken Parmesan, homemade sauce, homemade noodles, steamed broccoli, garlic bread, chocolate layer cake from scratch as well as hand cranked ice cream). Thank heavens I am not having issues with the burners.

> Finally, although we live in central Indiana near Indianapolis, there has not been any service man available to us to fix these issues. We are the ultimate do-it-yourselfers, so for us it has not been a huge issue, but dang it!! we shouldn't have had these issues in the first place.

I sincerely hope that you can address these problems because I really want to regain the love-at-first-sight I felt in Chicago all those years ago."

I have heard from Mr. Waymire who said that the engineers are looking into these problems. ??? What? Did I get a prototype or something? Is everyone having these issues?

I have received a different fan cover for the convection fan as well as new drip pans (still not wide enough to cover) and new rails which will hold the burner grates on the right side of the stove top in place. I have not installed any of these items yet--frankly I am disgusted that I have to do it at all.

I believe that I either got a lemon or Culinarian is just another example of shoddy workmanship.

Please tell me that those of you who own these are not having the same experiences!

Sincerely,
Heidi