help! i had a disaster!!

Hia Ollie, welcome to SMF. Be sure to make a Roll Call post and introduce yerself proper-like. Thank ye kindly.

Now... well, what were ya expecting? You basically have a cold smoker there. Move the fire pit closer. If you are looking to smoke/cook, most smoker temps need to be in the 150-200 range, depending on style of sausage. Internal temps should reach 155-ish for a hot smoked sausage.
You can use your oven set around 200. Plug a digi thermometer into a link and pull the sausage out when it nears 150 or so... it will climb to the 155 or so mark before it starts to cool. Dump into ice water bath to prevent fat melt out at that point.

Some helpful info would be type of sausage as well... Explain in your upcoming Roll Call Forum post ;{)

Hello Ollie: you have made yourself a fine cold smoker, which has it's place as well, it just isn't set up for smokin your sausage. Add yourself a heat source to your smokehouse, you can use: charcoal, electric or gas, whatever you prefer. Electric and gas are the easiest to control the charcoal bein the easiest to do. By doin this you will have the best of both worlds.

Your sausage is probably fine, just finish them in the oven. You are in the midst of a learnin curve here, just ride her out and you'll have gained some knowledge for the next batch! Don't give up, we've all had our failures wheter we wan't to admit it or not! Good luck and ask any questions you'd like, someone will be happy to help!

At least you tried something. I did the same thing. The 4" pipe is big enough. I kept moving my fire box until it's right up to the smoker box. Mine still doesn't get hot enough to cook, even after adding Elect. elements, because the smoke box is to big. Naw I didn't say that. It holds about 150# of sausage and is the best cold smoker you could ask for.
Hey now you have a reason to get a new MES.

Smoking

I second the excuse to get an MES, i love mine and use it for cold smoking too

olliedog, you have acheived what alot of people purposefully set out to do and sometimes can't. Traditionally kielbasa is usually only cold smoked then cooked at eating time. I try to cold smoke mine for as long as i can and usually a couple hours in i will finally turn on the heat. Once you do decide to heat until cooked make sure it's a slow process. You don't want to sweat out all the fat.

If it's too cold to get temps up to finish cooking just do like others suggested and finish in the oven. 2-4 hours of straigh cold smoke is enough to get the smoke flavor in there and some of the preserving quality of the smoke. Then you can just use the oven for its heat.

Oh, I don't quite agree. Never saw a cold smoked raw kielbasa. And I've been making it for over 40 years. Traditional Polish (and I'm one) kielbasa is smoked with heat to a cooked state. Smoke is usually applied at a low temperature and this temperature is gradually increased to cook the sausage. Like the German purity laws for beer, Polish kielbasa is always pork, salt,garlic, and marjoram. Anything else to purists is just an imitation. I also think that if you were to sweat out all the fat, you'd be left with a piece of charcoal. Make your kielbasa, make sure your casings are dry after being stuffed, put in smoker, bring up temperature with smoke, cook to desired temperature and you're done. For complete instructions just do a search here for kielbasa smoking.