Wood Chip Pan Question

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murphy625

Fire Starter
Original poster
May 14, 2016
35
12
Hi folks,

I'm building a large vertical gas smoker..  Its 7 feet tall, 4 feet deep and 3 feet wide. 

I'm using a straight pipe burner I've calculated to produce about 30,000 btu's at full throttle.. 

My smoker is well insulated and built out of 11ga  316 stainless steel, then insulated with 2 inch of mineral wool insulation and covered in steel barn siding.

My wood chip pan is a stainless steel sink that is about 16 inches x 20 inches x 6 inches deep.     I made a plate to cover the drain hole.

My questions:

What's with all the sawdust I'm seeing?   Should I be planing on using saw dust instead of larger wood chips?

My most important question: How far above the pipe burner flames should my wood pan be?  Being its a stainless steel sink, I didn't see any harm in letting the flames touch the sink.  Or is that bad?

I've seen a lot of folks making wood pans out of a screen material..   Is that important for some reason?   Maybe something to do with the ashes falling away?

Thanks!
 
Chunks would be better. 2"-3" chunks of wood. An eight-ten inch cast iron pan would work fine. As for height above your burner you'I'll need to play with that a bit and it will Depend on your pit temps. You want the wood to smolder. I'd make provisions so you can move the wood pan up and down depending on the pit temp.
 
My wood pan is a stainless steel sink..

How far above the flames is your wood pan?
 
Pics and diagrams and more specific info would help, but I'll take a shot at this.

The stainless steel pan may get too hot too quickly, you may want to place a small dutch oven inside the SS pan for your smoker box.

I also agree that chunks would be better.

As far as the burner from the pan, thats gonna be trial and error, If it were me, I would make the chip pan infinitely adjustable or at least three adjustments. One for Low, Medium and High, testing each height.

Are you making the pipe burner? if you are, you may want he burner slots underneath the burner and not on top, however, I would go with a Bango burner but the air shutter needs to be outside the unit and may not be centered in your smoker.

I would also suggest a water pan, I wont go into the whole, "Sand/Water" discussion, but I feel a water pan with water will give you better control on a vertical (reducing drastic temperature swings)
 
Going to try to upload some screen captures of my autocad..

Keep in mind, my cabinet is 7 feet tall, 50 inches deep and 36 inches wide on the inside.

The pipe burner is a 1-1/4 pipe with a quantity of 80 holes 1/8 inch diameter.  

I've drawn the sink in so its about 3.5 inches above the pipe burner. 



 
Impressive

Have you tried the pipe burner yet?

My concern with the pipe burner is the holes facing up, the holes can get plugged, I have slots and mine face down.


Could you do a two burner system, where as one burner would be preset under the chip pan for smoking and another for controlling the heat?
 
 
Impressive

Have you tried the pipe burner yet?

My concern with the pipe burner is the holes facing up, the holes can get plugged, I have slots and mine face down.


Could you do a two burner system, where as one burner would be preset under the chip pan for smoking and another for controlling the heat?
I had no idea the holes could or would be subject to plugging..  Is this due to the dripping of the meat?   That's a darn fine suggestion that I had not considered.    I don't have enough space below to turn the holes down without raising the entire pipe up a few inches..  perhaps I'll make a deflector shield that is just big enough to cover gravity drips but still let the flames out.  

Thanks for that suggestion...

I have not tried the pipe burner yet..   I'm going to be using the same natural gas feed hose I use with my portable generator and there's a JIC flare fitting on the hose that I don't have an adapter for.. I ordered it on Ebay ($8 freaking dollars for a stupid JIC to Male Pipe adapter) and it should be here on Monday.   I'm probably going to have to drill out the gas injector orifice on the air mixer thingy I ordered from one of the BBQ supply websites.   (am I allowed to post the website names on this forum?)   I'm not sure how big I'm going to need to go but I'll just start small and make it larger as I need.   My natural gas pressure here is only 3.5 inches on my home made manometer..   My gas hose is 35 feet long but its 1 inch in diameter..  feeds my 10hp generator at full throttle with no issues and I know that will suck 100,000 btu's at full load.

Gotta love AutoCad..   My entire smoker is built out of scrap steel and scrap equipment..   I did purchase some barn siding for it and had to purchase that air mixer thing for the pipe, but everything else was scrap materials.

I could do a two burner system if I end up needing to do that but I think I'm going to go with just one for the time being and see how it goes..   Eventually I will hook up a PID temperature control system to it but for right now, I'm just going with a Maverick wireless thermometer, a single burner, and I'll just have to keep checking on it.
 
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