WSM DISASTER

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robin h

Fire Starter
Original poster
May 18, 2017
43
16
Southern Saskatchewan
Well my second cook had a disastrous moment. I was putting a pork butt on the grill and I must have dropped it then pushed to one side. The top grate moved from its position and tipped. The butt crashed down into the water pan, which then tip as well letting the butt fall down into the coals. So some choice words where spoken. This happened at 10pm and I am pretty sure I woke the neighbourhood up.

So rescued the butt. Wasted a load of fuel. Shut down the operation for the night. Restarted in the morning. Completed a 12 hour cook. The pork butt came out pretty good. There is always room for improvement. I really hope this one a one time FUBAR LOL.


Thanks for looking & reading my OOP's 
 
$&@" doh! I've tipped the grates once or twice myself. Filled the water pan one time and had the whole thing tip in the fire. I think I've seen mods to extend the braces for the grates and pan. But, as long as saved the and lived to smoke another day......

Lance
 
yup had the same thing happen to me with a rack of beef plate ribs ages ago,  now use offset  stickburner  because of that. but hey you kept going and didn't give up  thats the main thing  
 
Fix it Take the screws out Put some washers behind the brackets.

Richie
 
You have my sympathy! I'll tell you a story in hopes of making you laugh.

Twas the night before my wedding reception (we had a short/private wedding the week before), and I was smoking 4 pork shoulders on my two vertical smokers. Just like WSM's except extremely old and cheap! I was doing 3 of them "normal" and 1 Carolina style. Needless to say I was happy as could be, with no work the next day, lots of meat smoking, music blaring, and a generous amount of Jagermeister in me. All 4 shoulders hit the stall period around 3-4am, which meant I was a good 3-4 hours behind on getting them done, pulling them, getting showered and dressed, and driving everything to the venue which was a good hour away. I decided to take action and wrap them in foil while bumping my temps up a bit to help push through that stall period. 7-8am rolls around and I see we're coming out of the stall period and things are back on track. Time to lose the foil. Seeing how I was too dumb to invest in silly things like gloves or smokers built after  the Reagan administration I had a certain way to fold the foil around my pork shoulders so that I could simply grab the corners and pulling up so the meat sort of flips out of the foil and back onto the grate. This was too much for my poor smoker to bear, so the little metal tabs holding the grate up broke. The grate fell similar to yours, onto the lower rack and the pork shoulder there, breaking one of those metal tabs sending both shoulders down to say hi to my drip pan. The water pan's tabs broke as well, sending EVERYTHING down into the fire. So as this scene was unfolding I kept leaning further and further down into my smoker trying to save things. I never moved so fast as when the water pan hit the fire and a Mt. Saint Helens-like cloud of steam and ash came up to say hello to my face. 

Luckily, my pork shoulders weren't messed up, and I was able to move them to be with the other two on my other smoker. I was even more lucky that the abundant natural light at the reception venue didn't highlight that I was a custom shade of pink-ish red.

So don't feel bad at all. These are the stories we tell each other over a beer.....while smoking meats on our new smokers. 
 
Just had an additional thought.  Check to make sure you have the correct grate on the correct level.  My lower grate is slightly smaller than my upper grate.  If the two were switched, the OP's disaster would happen quite often. 
 
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On mine the top grate has handles and the lower grate does not, and yes the lower grate on mine is a tad smaller.  However mine is the old style model (2005 model 18.5").  It looks like you had it right in your daylight photo though.
 
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I had the upper grate in that was the first thing I looked at. Thinking to myself what a rookie move lol. Both my grates have handles but one is smaller then the other for sure. This happened due to the bounce of 9 lbs of meat on the grate and perfect timing of the slight push CIA my hands. I totally learned a valuable lesson in this cook. I also am going to purchase heat gloves so I can stay over top the smoker longer to gently place meat in the greats.
 
This reminds me of the big oops  had a few years ago.  About five or six years ago my son called late on evening to say he was having a party the next day at his house to watch LSU and Alabama play for the championship of the SEC baseball tournament and asked if i would do some of my "world famous" jello ribs.  I had to run to the store for the ribs and got off to a late start. got everything ready on my rear carport. It was dark and the light was out on my carport but I had a security light that was providing enough light, or so I thought. Got out my rub and doused the ribs. It was getting late so i decided I would smoke them on my WSM to the point of putting them in the foil and then finish them the next morning. The next morning after firing up the WSM I placed the foil ribs on the smoker for a hour and a half. After pulling them from the foil I went to the pantry to get my rub to add to the BBQ sauce I noticed that my bottle of rub was unopened. Next to it was a new bottle of cayenne pepper which was half full. Realizing what I had done I placed them in a pan and went to the hose to give them a bath. Made for a funny picture. Then dried and put some rub on and finished the smoke. The ribs turned out great except they were a "bit" on the spicy side. My son said I created a new dish "Buffalo Hot Ribs".
 
I know this is VERY late but I was looking for a specific post on WSM's and have a suggestion that someone gave me a long time. Now I don't know how long you have been using your WSM so this might not work but I'll give it to you anyways..... I had the similar problem with the top rack wanting to teeter totter on the L shaped hinges inside and I was convinced they would collapse when I put my meats on it. What I did was back all the nuts and bolts out and put some washers on the inside which PUSHED the L's out a little bit more reducing the gap and making it VERY difficult for the grate to fall down. I've had mine now for about 3-4 years and I have YET to have the grate collapse on me. Now I use both racks and many times ONLY the top rack and it never moves.

Hope this might help someone out.
Tony
 
I too have fallen victim to a similar disaster. I was smoking a spatchcock chicken and nothing else (I've now learned the glory of a full smoker). Since the chicken was the only item in my WSM I left the bottom rack out - no need to dirty it for no reason. Well, about an hour in I opened the lid to insert a Maverick probe in the chicken and you guessed it - this made the rack move just enough to lose it's footing on the L brackets and send the chicken free falling directly into my empty water pan. Since the chicken was spatchcocked some of the juices escaped between the side of the water pan and inside of the WSM wall, landed on the coals and started a small fire. I managed to remove the chicken rather unscathed, waited a bit until the flames subsided and carefully continued the cook. The next day I was at the hardware store purchasing washers for the L brackets and I've never had a repeat event. I do take extra time to "center" the racks even 2 years later due to the bad memory haha

On my WSM (18.5) the handles of the top rack are standard handles while the handles of the bottom rack are curved where your fingers wrap around when you're moving it. This helps identify which is which as the racks do have slightly different OD's as has been mentioned already.
 
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