Recent content by klr

I played around with it tonight for a few hours. No smoke or meat, so I know things will change, but it appears that it works to even out the heat. I tried without the oval pan, and then with it in different positions. The most even heat was when I had the oval pan positioned with the deepest...

Great idea. I hadn't thought of clean up problems. I was planning on keeping my water pan under the lowest rack so not much would drip on the shield. None should reach the central tube. Should I not use the water pan? I've used it empty so far, but I've only smoked meat three times.

Tonight I bent the edges and drilled a hole in the center tube to drain the drippings onto the bottom pan. I also removed the nuts and drilled holes in the flange to install it upside down. The nuts were swaged into the flange so I had to dremel them flush with the flange before I could wiggle...

Wow. Thanks for the detailed reply. That set up looks great. Before you posted that info I tried your suggestion to flip the shield. I need to drill three holes in the mounting flange and use nuts, but it looks like it might work. I'd need to drill a drain hole in the lower right edge and...

I thought about that, but I want the shield to come closer to the right side and back. Did you add a shield to keep the juices from dripping on the element?

I'm thinking about modifying the chip tray/shield assembly of my MES 140S to give me more even heat and to keep it from dumping heat straight up to the temp sensor and then out the top vent. It seems to me that the top shield is great for keeping heat in the chip tray area, but bad for...

With the 4 hole setup I got 2.5 hours from a little over a third of the tray of pellets. It burned down the first row and around the corner before I pulled the tray out and stopped smoking. At that point I was running out of time and had to wrap the ham in foil and finish it in the oven at a...

Thanks, guys. I picked the stock pot because it was food grade stainless and cheap. Last night I drilled two rows of 3/8" holes under where the pellet tray rests. There are 5 holes per row. This morning I started smoking at 5 am and the pellets were all gone in less than 3 hours. Ooops, too...

Thanks for the link. It looks like I may need more air than I originally thought, but I won't know until I try it.

Christmas came early and my wife gave me my first ever smoker; a MES 140S from Cabela's. I love to tinker so I got right to building a "mailbox" for a 5x8 A-Maze-n pellet tray. I came up with a smoke chamber built out of a $10 12qt stockpot from Wal-Mart. One question I have is how many and...