New to me - Old school Oklahoma Joe!!

Thanks for all the info gr0uch0! I have spent lots of time lurking on here and reading the mods when I was looking at some of the big box buys of cheaper models. In fact I bought one of the $138 (or whatever the clearance price was) Oklahoma Joe Highland's last fall at Wal Mart, brought it home and never opened the box before I returned it.

That said, I know of a couple mods I want to do - I'll check the OKJ therm that came with the smoker for accuracy. I have a 3" (or so) Tel-Tru I use on my BGE that I love. I'll buy 1 or 2 similar to install on this smoker. I'm going to make a diffuser plate of some sort. I'm going to extend the chimney to the grate level. And I'd like to add the "clamp/locks" to the smoking chamber lid. I think they look cool and serve a good purpose - whether the weight of my lid requires them is to be determined. that's where I plan on starting.

My only concern if you want to call it that is the length of the firebox. Regular length firewood doesn't fit in very well so I'm going to need to cut what I buy or go cut my own to length. And I'm not sure how good this will do with just splits. It seems small enough that it will need charcoal and wood splits to maintain good even heat. This is the kind of thing I will learn through trial and error or by reading posts from folks with a similar setup.

Last - this find was in Wilmington, NC. Our airport code is ILM, hence my username. I can't tell you how many years I have been putting "smoker" or "offset" or some similarly key word in the local CL search. I missed out on a nice Klose years ago - so I jumped on this one pretty quickly once I found it. Timing is everything although I have no clue what the true market around here is for an offset smoker like this. Sometimes it takes the right buyer - and this buyer feels pretty lucky tonight.