Yup... I was deceived... Looks like 1/2" round stock to me...
Yes, in that pic above the square tubing isn't apparent. The top face is blending in with the gravel drive, and the shadowed back face just looks like a single rod. I see now what you were looking at.
Anyways, yesterday was... rough. 100ºF+ head index and I went out around 8AM, got home around 8PM. I did take 2 hours or so out to run to town, shower and change and go to a funeral for one of my patients, then back to the house to change back into my sopping wet jeans and go back out to finish up.
Here is what I ended up with at the end of the day.
It's not as perfect as I would have liked, my fitup wasn't great. I've got it heavily tacked and a couple of 2-3" welds holding it in place, but I'm going to have some gaps to deal with. I had a number of issues I had to overcome (the heat being not the least of them!) and had to trim and grind my opening to fit the firebox in repeatedly. Still, I got it in, got it lined up, got things level and got it attached. Had to go back to a bubble level, as my stupid digital level crapped the bed in the middle of things. I'm trying to get the seller from
Amazon to email me a copy of the manual so I can see if I can reset it, but if not, I'll definitely be buying a new one. The digital level is absolutely incomparable in fabrication in my situation - no flat floor, no flat table, nothing. It's like my left arm for things like this.
Anyways, she's now on 4 wheels, and will be for the rest of her life. She pulls in and out of the shop quite easily with that pull handle I made. Front axle swings easily on a 3/4" bolt. I may pull this off again and put in a set of needle roller thrust bearings I bought. I tried it, didn't like that it lifted separated the axle and mount by 1/4" or so, and allowed for 'rocking' left to right, so I removed it.
After sleeping on it, I may put it back in. It had washers top and bottom, but honestly, I think I can leave those out and just put in the thrust bearing, saving some space. There's really no need for the washers, as there is flat metal surface above and below - the bottom face of the axle mount and the top of the axle itself. That'll reduce the potential rocking left to right, I think, and honestly, it doesn't matter much. Not like a smoker gets pulled and run through the hills and fields and on the roads and that sort of thing. Using the thrust bearing will separate it a tiny bit and reduce damage to any paint I put on it from the axle rubbing on the mount. I think. I dunno. It may be worth a try, we'll see. Here's the thrust bearing for those, who don't know what I mean:
So now it's all finish work - cut the door, mount the hinges, build the stack. I've also got some finagling to do for the firebox door. That firebox was so GD'd heavy, trying to move it around by hand was impossible, flipping it over side to side, it fell on it's face and it's back (door side) a couple of times, tried using the tractor as much as possible, but still needed to manipulate it into different orientations to get things done - and consequently, it fell on the door and possibly tweaked it - in spite of 3x ¼" hinges with 6x ¼" hinge mounts. I've got a slight dent in one of the intake pipes which should be easy enough to get back into shape, but I bent the hell out of my intake control rod, so that'll need to be torched and straightened, or I might just cut it and rebuild it. We'll see.
In order to manage to move it around better, I ended up welding 2 pieces of square tubing to the sides of the firebox and made myself the heaviest and most expensive wheelbarrow I've ever seen!
Actually worked quite well, and once I got the firebox mounted to the cook chamber, I just cut those off, and I'll grind out the tacks.
I also mounted a vertical baffle to the front of the firebox, which resides inside the cook chamber. I've used this design numerous times and I really like how it helps keep the temps extremely even across the lower racks. Usually in an offset smoker you have a superheated zone directly in front of the firebox, where superheated gasses and smoke exit into the cook chamber. People either don't cook on this zone, or use a blocking log there, or many manufacturers put a horizontal or downward-sloping baffle here to deflect the heat. This, in my experience, causes even more problems cooking, honestly.
With a horizontal or downward-sloping baffle, the heat is directed down and out and once it clears the baffle, it then flows upward - as heat naturally does, laws of physics being what they are, and all. This prevents the first section of the cook chamber from being blasted by direct heat, but what it does is allow that heat to become a radiant cooking zone, from the hot baffle below. Then, as it moves outward into the cook chamber past the baffle, you get a convective cooking zone out in the middle and heat moves up to the top, to cook top-down through the latter half or third of the cook chamber, before the heat and smoke exits out the exhaust. I don't like this arrangement, I think it makes for complicated cooking zones that are vastly in different, from radiant to convective and different temps and styles and directions of heat and air flow. Ugh.
So I use this vertical baffle design - heat and air coming out of the firebox are immediately directed up to the top of the cook chamber, exactly where they want to go - again, those pesky physical laws and such. From that point, you have true convective top-down cooking through the entire cook chamber.
One thing I noticed when first experimenting with this, with a removable baffle I made, was that the area directly behind the baffle plate (i.e., the part of the cooking grates directly in front of the firebox throat opening) was actually the coolest area of the smoker! By 30-40ºF! So, I've played around with designs and implementation, cut some holes in the baffles to allow some heat through, but not all - and have managed to achieve cooking grate temps of 2-5ºF difference from end to end. This was on a 250-gallon pit. And I'm not talking looking at the temps on door-mounted dial thermometers. I'm talking grate level temps in real cooking conditions. See below:
As you can see, the three temps in the middle (labeled Lower Throat, Lower Middle and Lower Collector) are insanely close in temp. This varies more if you really are blasting the fire, as it changes flow characteristics throughout the cooker, but it demonstrates if you control your fire you can achieve consistent temps across the whole lower grate.
Now,
naturally shooting all the heat directly upwards leads to hotter temps on the upper racks - a phenomenon anyone who cooks on offset smokers will tell you is normal. And this is why many builders don't even include upper racks. If you order them, they will include them at extra cost, but will warn you about hotter temps up top. This is common sense and once again... physics. Duh.
Personally, I
like to utilize the upper racks for hot & fast cooking while low & slow is going on down below. Chikkin, pork belly, stuff like that. You learn how your cooker runs, and you use those 'zones' to your advantage. Works like a charm, and I LOVE it!
So all that to preface the pics of my baffle that I have taken to using. <whew!> Lotta reading, I know. lol. But I felt explanation was in order, as many will have lots of questions about my design and why I've done it this way.
And yes, it's open at the bottom. Allows a little (theoretical) updraft from cooler air in the bottom of the tank flowing backward from the collector end upwards due to the movement of heat and air up as it exits the firebox, and also allows for scraping the inside of the baffle to allow debris to fall to the bottom of the tank.
So now, after yesterday's marathon in the heat, I am sitting on my ass at home, drinking coffee and debating if I want to go back out there and work some more, or take the day off and recuperate and be lazy. I don't know yet.
If there are any questions I haven't answered in my dissertation above (lol, sorry!), feel free to ask!
