My name is jason I built a homemade pit style smoker about 4 years ago. After doing a lot of research I decided pit styoe was what I wanted. I wanted more of an old school style smoker. I know its more of a chalenge to use a pit style than one with a fire box but I figured it would be worth it. After some tweaking on my design and some trial I found what I built is a great smoker. It will run for abou 5 hours on one big bag of walmart brand charcoal. I have done anything from sausage to turkeys on it. Tried a variety of woods wild cherry, shag bark hickory, smoth bark hickory, mesquite, apple, and pecan. The smoker itself was a fuel drum a friend had lying around measures aprox 3x6 the stacks are aprx 3 feet long made of 3" exhaust pipe.