might have found an easy fire basket.

[porterman]

was out wasting a saturday at my local ace hardware and saw a vegetable grilling basket by weber for $25 and thought to myself,this might be an easy fire basket for my chargriller smoking pro. went ahead and bought it,made my next stop at the market for a pork butt,and made my way home and tried it out. it fits perfectly across the rails for the grills normally in the fire boxlined the bottom with coals and lit some others in a chimney. when they were hot,added them and let the chamber come to temp,about an hour or so. added some dry hickory chunks to the fire,closed the lid and put the butt in the main chamber and left it to go. temp ramped a bit,then settled down to 200 and i didnt add coals or wood for a couple hours. basically,i cooked the thing for 11 hrs and it came out pretty good,last one i did was better but i have to say,i didnt do the best job of controlling the fire and the temps did drop a few times.

my impressions are that while this basket does work,it has slots in it that really arent big enough to let the ashes fall. had to bang on it a lot to clear the ashes so the temps would stay up. Today,after i cleaned out the fire box, i took the basket to my work bench to see what i could do. tried drilling holes in it but it is stainless steel,not too thick but it didnt take me too long to realize this wasnt gonna be an option. so i took a large flat bladed screw driver and pryed the slots so they might let the ashes fall a little better. gonna be a little while before my next cook so i dont know if its gonna work but if it does or doesnt,ill post to let ya know.

 

[daveomak]

 Ingenuity at it's best.......   good job porterman....   Dave

 

[arkashby]

The one I was thinking about using was this one. thought I could cut out some of the holesout to make some squares for the ash.

41JH97W3JHL.jpg

• arkashby
• Jul 29, 2012

 

[porterman]

very similar to what i have and i honestly feel like it would be better then what i have even with the slots pryed out,im having a bit of trouble getting the ash to fall thru. the expanded metal ones would probably be better at that with their larger holes.

 

[porterman]

what a dope i am. realized that i have a dremel and it was pretty easy to just cut out between a number of the slots,making several larger holes for the ash to fall thru.

 

[arkashby]

LOL, I used my dremle to cut sqares with the holes

 

[porterman]

ive used it for a few smokes and while it does work,i decided to make a bigger basket out of expanded metal that will hold more coal and lend itself more to the minion method. i made it to where it will fit inside the rails that normally hold the cast iron grills and put angle iron on the sides to engage those rails. that way i can still use the ash drawer. basically just cut it,folded it over,and used nuts,bolts and fender washers to hold it togather. havent used it yet but it looks like it will work good.