Brisket and chicken adn beans, oh my!.JPG

Hey, I have an extra filing cabinet that I plan on making an electric smoker from. Insulating from the outside, then wrapping it in some attractive wood planks for neat look. I have Brinkman electric element that looks like what you have here. Do I need to worry about keeping drippings off of element? I plan on placing metal pan for wood chips on the element. The cabinet is a 5 drawer cabinet. Will this element get the heat that I need?
Thanks in advance for any input.

HI Ken,
I can by no means claim I'm an expert. However, if you insulate well, you should get all the heat you need. Without measuring, I estimate your interior will be maybe "1 drawer" bigger than my cabinet, perhaps a little less. My interior is something like 45X17X18 and has over an inch of insulation between the walls. I have used mine for over 3 years all year round including the winter up here in Michigan with no heat problem whatsoever. I have no fear of opening the door because the heat recovery is very fast. If I bypass the thermostat, I get temps over 350 after awhile. It is very easy to hook the element up to a thermostat controlled outlet.
I don't as a rule let a lot of drippings get to my element, but I've smoked a butt without a drip pan and it is fine. But the cleanup was terrible.
I also made a much larger smoker cabinet with the same set up that I haven't finished testing yet. That one doesn't recover as fast because of the volume of space to heat.
Making a "heating cabinet" and controlling the temps was easy, my main challenge was the smoke generation. My first attempt was a simple pan with chips set on the element. It worked, but only for short periods, and less if I wanted to do any sort of cold smoking. My next project was a smoke generator from an example I found on line. It worked very well and I used that for over 2 years, tweaking it as I went. But I had to hold my mouth right to get the amount of smoke I wanted, it was too easy to make too much smoke. Then I swicthed to the Amazen Pellet Smoker and haven't looked back. I just tuck it on the side, tent some foil over it in case there are drippings, and it smokes away for hours and hours. I did put a heat shield under and around it as the first time I used it the embers jumped rows. But after the heat shield, it is good to go. Smokes overnight just fine. It works so well I'll buy one for my bigger smoker before I sell it, the learning curve is basically zero.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask more questions.