My 1st Smoked Whole Chicken

So my first Smoked Chicken was harder than I thought it'd be but ended turned out AMAZING!

I've got a Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill vertical smoker (Cheap but I'm a newbie so oh well) and it was IMPOSSIBLE to keep at a high temp and I'm not 100% sure why! I had to add charcoal 4 times in the 5:30 that it took to cook!  But even after 5+ hrs in the smoker i couldn't get internal temp of the chicken over 159 Deg.  So I heated my oven to 260 deg and let the bird finish in there for about 40 min.  After that i let it rest for another 30 min before I cut into it hacking off the Wings first then the drumsticks then pretty much took everything apart with my hands.

I did brine my chicken for almost 24hrs.  The brine I used consisted of

1/2 cup White Sugar

1/2 Pound Table Salt

3 Tbsp  Fresh Ground pepper

3 Tbsp  Garlic Powder

1 cup Warm Water

16 Cups Cold Water

Mixed the salt in 1 cup warm water then dropped in the Sugar and stirred until it was dissolved then added all the other ingredients

here are pics of my 1st attempt which turned out way better than I imagined!