1215
Fire Starter
- Feb 22, 2017
- 70
- 17
It's holding up great! I've made three drums and I feel like I'm starting to find a sweet spot for a competition style drum. Everything is a tradeoff in life. Each of the three drums are slightly different and have different pros and cons which has been a really cool/fun learning process. One of the only issues I'm having with the drums is cooking low and slow. Not the slow part (fire basket holds plenty of fuel) but I feel like while the insulation is great --it keeps it SO HOT.
We have a radiant heat slab floor in our home. They call radiant heat in slabs a "flywheel effect", like the flywheel on a car. The purpose of a flywheel on a car is rotating mass. The mass of the flywheel keeps the motor turning (smoothly) when you let your foot off the gas and stop higher RPMs. It equalizes and balances the motor. With a home on a slab with radiant heat you are raising and lowering the temperature of a giant concrete slab. How we have heat loss in a lot of drums the second we take the lid off, if we aren't paying attention to the weather during the fall months it can take a day or two to get our house up to temp and if we get a warm snap in January our doors are open.
Finding that balance within the drum has been interesting and I'm still tweaking. Too small of a flywheel and you get spikes up and down. Too large and you can't make a quick change when you want. Then there is the consideration of even heat distribution within the cook chamber and the protein the cooker was intended to cook. It's been a very interesting process switching out different size (both physical size and metal mass) diffuser plates and mediums.
So yes, holding up well and I've tried sand. (currently using cast iron)
