RF conversion

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bakin

Newbie
Original poster
May 23, 2014
5
10
I'm new to the site but not smoking. My late father and I built a simple straight flow smoker out of a 250 gal. propane tank when I was sixteen years old. I am now 51 and I have lugged this smoker to many different domiciles and two different states. There have been literally 100's of briskets, racks of ribs, chickens and several turkeys smoked on this thing. It is a very crude design with little to no damping/fire control system. I have learned how to control it over the years by trial and error and have to say, it produces some darn fine BBQ.

After 35 years, and my last move (I hope), I have decided to do some upgrades. It went from just making it an offset to full blown RF. Why change something that works well? That's a good question. I really don't know....I do know that it is very temperamental to regulate and it burns a ton of wood in order to maintain temps (which I generally judge by the color and quantity of smoke). I reckon like anything else I just wanted an upgrade and to make it better. I originally just thought I would sell it (its really too big for my needs) and get a smaller one but after I looked at decent quality examples, I just couldn't swallow the prices. My wife mentioned that I would be sorry if I sold my smoker and after 23 years of marriage I've learned to listen closely to her. 

I did tons of research on this site and many others, looked at tons of pics, and used the calculator to come up with the the conversion. I figured that so many people were gracious enough to post their info that I should do the same. 

I have not completed the conversion but would say I'm about 75% done so the final results are yet to be seen. All I know is, that if this thing doesn't preform much better than it did i'm gonna be highly disappointed. Here are the beginning pics.




 
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