I found one for sale

[tbakko]

In your opinions is this smoker worth $100, I want to smoke all kinds of meats like a turkey and a ham at the same time? I am new to smoking meats, would this be a good one to learn with?

 

[eman]

Hmmmm,

 To me, All i can see is the Major hot spot in the middle that even looks like it is on the top shelf too.

Never seen a smoker like this, So i can't tell you that it's not worth $100.

Would i buy it??? No .for the same reason that i can't say what it's worth. Never seen one like it so can't say how it would cook.

 

[scarbelly]

Hmmmm,

 To me, All i can see is the Major hot spot in the middle that even looks like it is on the top shelf too.

Never seen a smoker like this, So i can't tell you that it's not worth $100.

Would i buy it??? No .for the same reason that i can't say what it's worth. Never seen one like it so can't say how it would cook.

+1 on the the hot spots - I personally would save your $ and get something new
 

 

[ryanhoelzer]

Yeah, If it had something to disperse the heat coming up from underneath it might be OK but you can pretty much tell from the discolored spot right in the middle of the grate that there's a major hotspot.

You might be able to make some modifications though.

 

[bamaboy]

For sure would need a plate to even the heat out and possibly move exhaust to the center.If you could talk them down to 50-60 bucks it might be worth it...

 

[mballi3011]

I'm with Bob (eman) on this one for the jury is out for me too.

 

[coacher72]

I would agree with everyone else and not be interested in buying it. The hot spot would be a problem. You would lose some cooking area because you would have to position your meat around the opening from the bottom mounted firebox. I'm not sure why they made it that way. Anyway that is my 2 cents for what it's worth.

 

[realtorterry]

For another 50 bucks you could probably get an S & P new

 

[forluvofsmoke]

Yeah, the hot spot was the first thing to catch my eye, then, the vent stack position in correlation to the fire box. The design has numerous flaws.

Most of the heat will be wasted, so it would burn very high amounts of charcoal/lump in comparison to a standard offset design with mods. With the additon of a baffle plate over the firebox, some of the heat could be spread out more evenly to a larger area of the cooking grate, but then, you have the vent stack position to contend with, which would require additional baffle/tuning plates in order to redirect the flow towards the left hand end of the smoke chamber. It would be be a nightmare at best to get this smoker to operate very well at all. And I'm say this after spending over 15 hours tuning my Brinkmann SNP full tuning plate, so I do have a lot of patience and tons of oven rack therms for working out grate temp issues, but I can't say I'd want to try to get that rig up to par.

I can see where the builder was going with the design, as I was tossing some ideas similar to this to convert an old Brinkmann gas grill (retired) to a charcoal smoker. The centrally located firebox plan was one of the ideas I soon deleted from my computer after calculating what would be required to get it to heat evenly. The basis behind this design was likely to get as much heat as possible from the fire box into the smoke chamber. The problem lies in controlling the heat and flow once it gets there. I didn't want to pull my hair out trying to get the design off the ground, so I scrapped that design completely.

I'd wait for something else to come along, or just buy a bit smaller rig brand new and do the mods it needs to do a good smoke with a decent load of meat on the grates.

Eric