Happy New Year! ::: December 31, 2011 :::

Our new site is coming…I promise. There is still stuff here if you poke around. The new site will have the new sauces and t-shirts to order. After years of promising I promise this year will be the year of the cookbook! Here is something to keep you busy in the meantime.

This is an easy little project if you have minimal skills and some free time. Please note that this is a temporary setup and now I am going to clean up the connections and make it look all nice. I can maintain 228 degrees [within +/- 3 degrees] for almost 8 hours right now. A few more tweaks and I hope to get to 10-12 hours.
First, I bought another Bar B Chef Offset Smoker off Craigslist. They are great smokers that used to be sold at Barbecues Galore. They originally sold for around $200. They are thicker and much better built than the Home Depot cheapos. You can usually find one on Craigslist and I even bought one off this board a while ago. Plan on spending around 100 bucks. You can mod a Home Depot cheapo too but they lose a lot of heat through cheap metal so plan on draping it with a blanket when it is freezing cold…like 50 degrees here in Arizona!

I bought some high heat gasket maker from Amazon for about $10. It is food safe and it is good up to 900 degrees which leaves plenty of room to not worry about it overheating. Clean the spots that touch when you close your smoker with a wire brush. Spray the barrel side with Pam really well and then run a bead of the gasket maker around the lid. Close the lid for 24 hours for it to cure. When it’s done open it up and clean it up. Touch up as needed. You may find more leaks during your test run.

Instead of buying or making a tuning plate I bought 14 cent tiles from Home Depot and put them in the bottom of the smoking chamber. Place them closer together at the smoker opening to promote airflow across the bottom. The tiles absorb a lot of heat and help to keep the chamber even. Mine is now less than 10 degrees across the cooking area after this mod. Before it was 23 degrees. Also, I added a baffle between the firebox and the cooking chamber to force hot air down and eliminate the hot spot.

I also sealed up the smoke stack and other metal connections that showed leaks. One tube will easily seal two smokers.

A roasting pan with water in it will also help you keep even heat and add moisture to the situation which is good.

Use some bolts to raise up the fire grate. Fires get smothered when they don’t have enough room to breath. This will help keep your fire going for much much longer.

I made this very temporary way to connect a blower to the firebox. I just bent some tin for research purposes, I will be cleaning up this connection but it works fine for now. I tried using fans but I couldn’t get a good draft so I switched to a blower which is the solution. I looked at the stoker and the guru and reverse engineered this connection kind of.

Here it is with the blower popped in. I used a 35cfm blower. I would use a 25cfm blower if I built a new one.[img]http://rockandrollbbq.com/images/PID/Blower.jpg[/img]
I haven’t built a charcoal box yet so I throw down a bed of unlit charcoal and then put a chimney of half lit charcoal on top kind of using the minion method. This will burn at temp for 8 hours depending on variables.

I bought a PID online. Wired it up and set the parameters and now I have the brains of a Guru/Stoker for 30 bucks! You need to buy a thermocoupler, project box, and some wires too. It can be done for under 50 bucks. I bought one made by [url=http://auberins.com]http://auberins.com[/url]. I used a 110v PID, next time I would buy a 12v one but they work the same.

I currently have these pig lights hooked up so they go off when the fan is triggered by the PID. This way I can see out the window at night that things are happening and all is good. You can hook up whatever you want. I also have a cop light, a wireless transmitter that triggers a light in the house, and a beeper. Whatever you can plug in you can use easily.

Here is the whole ghetto setup. Once it is dialed in I will make it all pretty.

So there it is in all of it’s glory. It took a while to figure out, I partially blame Jack Daniels. I blew up on PID by not reading the wiring instructions because I assumed I knew everything. The basic cost breakdown was as follows.

Smoker $100 [Craigslist]
PID $30 [Online]
Thermocoupler $4 [Online]
Gasket Goo $10 [Amazon.com]
Wires and Connectors $15 [Home Depot]
Project Box $5 [Radioshack or Fry's]
Pig Lights $0.99 [99 Cent Store]
Tin $1.98 for 2 [Home Depot]
Nuts and Bolts [My garage]

Total cost for a great smoking setup with automatic temperature control was about $166.97. This is an easy setup to use and could be used for competition even though I hate the use of temp control units in competition…but that is another conversation. I can’t believe you aren’t supposed to use TenderQuick and some competitions don’t allow MSG but you can use a computer?!?!? Whatever. Oh yeah…back to the unit…you should make one if you are looking at a cheap alternative to the fancy schmancy systems you see out there. The results are amazing from this smoker assuming you know all the other parts…like good recipes, meat selection. times, temps, and proper alcohol consumption.