"The Meatwagon"

Here's the revised door sliding mechanism design.


The sliding rails are server rack rails. The rest is all scrap metal. The pulleys are from a lawn tractor deck (the blade pulleys), attached to the rear swingarm of a Harley (halved). The cables have not been purchased yet, but will be new not scrap, for safety reasons. The weights have yet to be determined, but will need to weigh exactly what the front door weighs, so it provides appropriate counterweight. Possibly either solid iron rod, iron pipe filled with lead melted down from old batteries, or filled with concrete. Still undecided. We were supposed to weigh the door before we welded it into the smoker, but forgot to. Oh well, trial and error method.

The cool part, to me at least, is that the tractor was given to me by a kid I went to middle school with, the Harley was in the woods behind my parents' house and used to belong to their neighbor who just passed away (i'm sure he'd be pleased to know it was going to good use and not just being melted down into cheap Chinese junk), and the server rack rails were given to me by one of my vendors at work. "Everything has a story" as I always say. The oil tank came from some random dude on Craigslist. Apparently he just replaced his whole furnace system. I guess he was told that you can clean up oil spills with kitty litter... Somehow he took that as "put kitty litter inside your oil tank". You should have seen the sludge inside this tank....