general discussion??? 250 gal rf?

BCurrin, evening.....   Look through the builds and decide what you want to build....  We will be glad to help you with your build....

Dave

http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/f/197/smoker-builds

BCurrin752 said:

I ask for a couple of reasons. 1) I've only seen flush mounts 2) seems like you would want to utilize the path of least resistance and mount flush so the heat and smoke would flow, but maybe not... I MIGHT have been wrong once :)

Click to expand...

It may give a bit more control on certain pits. Some say it keeps the heat and smoke path at grate level when extended, this may benefit a larger diameter or taller pit, others will say an extended stack causes stale smoke . I extended mine 1" from the top and used an adjustable mod, I never noticed a difference either way, but as I Said before certain pits may benefit from this and them folks seem happy with this idea as it has helped them with temp problems in certain pits..

I suggest only going through the top about an inch or flush and make an adjustable insert.

Currin, morning...  My thoughts on extending the stack....   In a tall cooking area, with the stack at the top of the cooking chamber, the area near the grate has little or no air flow....  Now think about the design of a convection oven....  air flow.....  faster cooking at the same or lower temps....

Dave

On #19 , my stacks come down to within a couple of inches of the top grate, ( usually only used after ribs or butts are wrapped and doing the crutch )...but on that recent chicken cook, I had to use all four racks in order to fit the 120 half's they wanted cooked at the same time. Since my only part was to cook the chicken, I paid very close attention to what was happening on each rack. and found that the top rack, even though it was not cooking any faster, was producing a darker, more smoky flavored chicken with a bit of that bitterness we try to avoid, while all three lower racks produced much better looking ( by color)and better tasting chicken. With all of the racks having fairly equal cooking times,(using the universal drumstick twist guage) I will have to conclude that temperature was fairly even. Either it was stale smoke, or excess condensation at the top of the cook chamber mixing with smoke and dripping down, but there was a huge difference between the top and other three racks.....

So I'm going to go with the stale smoke theory. And is in part to do with why I decided an over sized and flush stack on my current build. It got me thinking about how food taste off of real open pits where the smoke is not trapped at all . 

You can do a lot more with a square firebox when it comes to vents. I have a 250 gallon build in the back of my mind and I always though of doing something like this with the firebox, I like extending the firebox under the chamber, but you need to try to keep the fire out from under it to help eliminate the hot spot. On #19, I added expanded metal to the fire grate to move the fire back ( 2nd pic)