Has anyone modded a Lang 36 patio?

[waterboy12]

I'm picking mine up in a couple weeks and was thinking of what I could do to make it that much better. I was thinking about installing a couple ball valves as dampers on the upper part of the firebox door to help push heat into the cooking chamber instead of just relying on the pin wheels dampers for airflow. Is there anything else that can be done?

 

[garyt]

Why would you buy a Lang and modify it before you even have it

 

[waterboy12]

Why would you buy a Lang and modify it before you even have it

Judging from chipotleQ's review the addition of an air source to ouch heat into the cooking chamber in a worth while modification. Besides I can leave anything alone. The same reason guys by a $80,000 Corvette and mod it. Does it absolutely need it? Probably not. Will it help? Absolutely, if it didn't help in one way or another it wouldn't be worth doing. I'm just throwing around ideas. Everything else gets modded. Why not a Lang.

 

[glocksrock]

You may consider adding a dryer vent to extend the smoke stack down a bit to keep temps more even so the upper rack isn't hotter than the lower rack. Also you may want to drill a hole for your temp probes. But I would probably see how well it works before you go trying to add more vents, and get a good feel for it, as if additional vents were neccesary, I'm sure they would have modified the design by now.

 

[waterboy12]

I don't lay awake at night dreaming how I can hack apart my new Lang. Just wondering how I can make it even better. Maybe there's not a thing I can do to make it better than it already is.....but what's the fun in that.

 

[JckDanls 07]

use to race moto-x... guys would try to mod their bikes so much so.... they were crap when they were done with it... cost to much to go back stock.... that's why we always ran STOCK... went by them while they and their modded bike sat on the side of the track with a DNF (did not finish).... just say'n....

 

[chipotleq]

So after talking to people at Lang, and researching, I found that most high end smokers have inlet vents in the FB doors opposite the smoke stack. What makes a Jambo pit so nice, is that exact quality. The smoke stack on a jambo is right in the middle of the chamber, and the firebox is so huge, the vents seem like they are within crosshair of each other. Having said that, the lang is designed differently, and I have been given really good advice for keeping close temperatures across the chamber.

First is to build a good fire with nothing but a bed of coals and embers. I have been told it is nicer to have a basket made to keep the embers and coals closer together. And also to add smaller splits of wood and to keep the fire as far away as possible form the opening into the smoking chamber.

Second, is to have the nose pitch of the grill pointing a bit above level. But only enough to still have the griddle baffle plate drain test water down the drain. Reason why the baffle plate is designed to have a considerable downward slope when you have all level is to allow a slope even when the cooker is pitched up a bit. This allows, according to Ben Lang and other highly experience Lang'ers, to have better heat distribution across the grates. With maybe only a 5-10 degree difference from bottom to top level grates. The way I had it setup was with the cooker having a downward pitch. I will do further testing this weekend and will come back with results. Sometimes it is good to have zones in a chamber.

And finally to keep everything even closer is to do cheap mod that only involves bringing the stack down a bit with 7-10 dollars worth of homedepot materials and is none permanent. This pic was taken from the lang forum, check it out, talk about the mod.http://lang.myfreeforum.org/Mods_To_Lang_36_about421.html

langstack.jpg

• chipotleq
• Nov 30, 2013

I would wait to try it out first with these tips, before moding the firebox like that.