This thread has died off a bit over the last couple of months but hopefully some of you earlier posters see this and can chime in since surely you all now have lots of experience with this bad boy!
Just got a new one. I have some limited experience with the el cheapo brinkmann smoke n pit. Here are my main questions for you guys
1. Sealing it up. I didn't use anything on the bolts on the legs or where the firebox meets the cooking chamber. While seasoning it last night, the only place I saw visible smoke leakage was from the cooking door which I know is an easy fix. Do I really need to worry about sealing up those bolt holes on the legs??? seems to me that with them being on the bottom they should be an issue. REally don't want to take this whole thing apart again. I did notice the 1/4" gap where the 2 halves of the firebox come together. I realize that I won't notice smoke coming from there but rather that is going to give the fire too much oxygen so I went ahead and sealed those up.
2. The only mod I did thus far was installed 2 brinkmann thermos on each side of the door. While seasoning last night I had the same experience that others reported, the Stock thermostat would read as high as 350 while the ones at the grate were only getting to 200-225. I didn't use a whole lot of charcoal so I'm not too worried about getting temps hot enough to cook with but I just want to be sure that I ran it hot enough for the curing process to do it's thing. I followed the instructions in the manual and went by what the stock thermos said regarding temperature. I ran it for 2 hours in the middle range of the BBQ zone and then an additional hour up between 350-400. Then let it cool. Am I good to start cooking? if not no big deal, I can do another seasoning run after doing a couple of other mods and get a feel for it. Incidentally, in stock configuration, I was not getting a huge differnece side to side, only about 30 degrees. That isn't bad to me, I can just do chicken on the firebox side and my other goods on the middle and left sides.
I'm looking forward to this smoker, I was getting some good results on the old smoke n pit after some practice so I think I'll be money on this. I'll be making my charcoal basket today and the caulk is drying on the doors as I type this (incidentally, I bought the Fire stop stuff as well since home depot didn't ahve the rtv stuff and I was impatient. I'm going to give it a go. I read one person who said that he thinks it dries hard and is no good while someone else who actually used it says it dries tacky. To me having it be a bit tacky seems like a good thing to help keep the door closed and sealed. Worst case scenario I will scrape it off and put the other stuff on. This stuff has a nice grey color that blends into the smoker nicely.