Recent content by EricBW

Officially I think I can start posting in the regular cooking pages, but one last one in the build thread. Wanted to do a full chicken this weekend. Buddy at work has been smoking for a long time and wanted to check this thing out. He brought some ribs, and a bacon wrapped, ground beef, cheese...

A little info to put here for you guys trying to determine air tank thicknesses... SH or SHTH = Shell thickness (main body) HD or HDTH = Head thickness (rounded caps) So this tank based off that plaque is .114" thick for the main body, and .094" thick on the rounded end caps.

Thanks for the input, and the compliments! V-shaped basket sounds like a good idea as well. I did find myself scraping coals together rather frequently, so that sounds like a good improvement!

First one's in the books guys! Took me a while to get a hang of fire management, and I'm king of getting the hang of what size splits to use. The air intake slider works awesome once I got coal bed, log size all figured out. Towards the end of the day (about 8hrs of fire time), I got it figured...

I do not have a stop in there at all, no. I get exactly what you're saying, and that is a.... grate... idea! haha. I will definitely do that in the future. I don't forsee myself accidentally pulling it out too far, but I do like to drink while I'm smoking, so a safety feature is a good idea!

Big progress on the smoker last night! Got home from work, and the expanded metal I ordered finally showed up. So I knocked out the cooking grate. I added some angle above the grate, so It can slide out like a drawer, and not fall out. I also added probe ports for my Fireboard 2...

Appreciate it! I taught myself to weld when I was a teenager... jump in and just learn it kind of thing. I'm the kind of guy that spends more time in the garage than the house, so its a valuable skill to have for sure!

Bit of a progress update.... It's nearing the finish line! First up was to finish weld everything I've done so far.... lots and lots of welding! It's been good practice though, I haven't done this much welding in a while, so welds are really starting to look nice! Next I decided to tackle...

Thanks!! Things are coming along, hoping to do a quick test cook, at least see how temperature control works this weekend

Up next was stack and firebox.... again more scraps from work. Might hafta rename this the scrapyard smoker lol. Stack was a big chuck of schedule pipe that was sitting on our steel rack at the shop for years. Easy choice. For the firebox, I had some drops of 1/8" sheet, that when folded into...

Well this project slid to the back burner while other house and car projects took priority, but we're back at it! Spring is getting close, and I'd like to have this ready for summer.... Like I wanted to do for last summer haha. I got sick of moving the tank around all the time, so the cart was...

Gotcha, I get down that area once in a while. My sister/brother in law live a bit west of Watertown

Just outside of Appleton now. Grew up in a real small town about 1/2hr south of Green Bay.

I'm lucky enough to have a home key for SolidWorks, so I got my firebox situation all figured out while watching the Packer game today. Now its up to when our laser at the shop has time to sneak a personal job in.... But this coming weekend is opening weekend for deer hunting here in Wisconsin...

Thanks! And yes, I am a partial partner in a machine shop. I'm the "program, setup, CNC repair, figure out how to do stuff when other guys cant" guy at our shop. haha. I've got no formal training in real fabrication work of this sort, but I've been building stuff for fun, handling farm repairs...