Ugly Drum Smoker

Bigmista said:

The door really isn't necessary. I found that out later. I only open it when I really need to crank up the heat quickly and most of the time Ihave to prop somethign against it to make sure it stays closed tight. I've learned a lot and my next one will be better.

I currently have six holes around the bottom and 4 holes around the top. I leave the holes at the top open during a cook and usually two holes at the bottom are open to give me steady 225-230 temps. I plug them with aluminum foil since the guy that made it just burned the holes in instead of drilling them and making them circular.

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you can also use magnets to put over the holes reuseable and neater

Great idea adding the legs on your grates!!! Nice photos!!:thumb:

brunski, I see in your pics that you only used 3 legs per rack. Any issues with tipping or balancing meat?

garyk1398 said:

brunski, I see in your pics that you only used 3 legs per rack. Any issues with tipping or balancing meat?

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Not if you're careful - just center the meat(s) if possible.

First of all, THANKS to all who have given advice on this thread. Without your advice, I would not have learned about the UDS and attempted to build one. Here is my finished UDS completed with the bottle opener, lid and the charcoal basket I made.

4dueces said:

First of all, THANKS to all who have given advice on this thread. Without your advice, I would not have learned about the UDS and attempted to build one. Here is my finished UDS completed with the bottle opener, lid and the charcoal basket I made.

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Great looking smoker, but Coors - with a Cardinals bottle opener?! You seem conflicted... :becky:

Nice looking drum.

Safety of this drum?

Finally got some pics of my drum. I got it from a reconditioning business that said it was unlined, but it looks like some red liner survived their 1000 degree burnout process. I've already drilled holes in this so I'd like to move ahead with my build. Any thoughts?

I'm thinking of burning it a couple of times and then having it sandblasted.

Sorry for the links but I've been trying to post pics according the procedures with no luck.

http://flic.kr/p/8Keofm

http://flic.kr/p/8KbkfT

jkalach said:

Finally got some pics of my drum. I got it from a reconditioning business that said it was unlined, but it looks like some red liner survived their 1000 degree burnout process. I've already drilled holes in this so I'd like to move ahead with my build. Any thoughts?

I'm thinking of burning it a couple of times and then having it sandblasted.

Sorry for the links but I've been trying to post pics according the procedures with no luck.

http://flic.kr/p/8Keofm

http://flic.kr/p/8KbkfT

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Hard to tell from pic's, but looks like rust. If thats the case, you are good to go. It won't hurt to do a burn, but if you get it sandblasted you are wasting time burning it out.

Looks like rust to me too.

Phubar said:

Looks like rust to me too.

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Thanks. It looks too red to be rust to me, and it has a sharp outline almost like when you rip wallpaper off a wall and some is left behind. Maybe I'll hit it with a wire wheel and see what happens.

The sandblasting place is charging by the hour and they said they could get down to bare metal faster if the paint was burned off.

The "rust" looking spots look dreaded red/pink lining on some food grade drums. I have one out in the back yard and it is the same shade of pink. Are the spots really smooth or rough?

With a few beers she will look alot better and if you smoke overnight, man she could be a ten in the dark and all.

As promised earlier, here's an overview of my Ugly Drum Smoker build. I hope the cut/paste from my blog comes out OK.




This is one of my two drums. They were both similar. I purchased reconditioned, food grade, open headed drums. You can see the dreaded red liner on the inside. This stuff is tough, and needs to be burnt/scraped/burnt out. Try to avoid it if you can!
One thing that irked me about this drum - check out how uneven the top rib is. Is that normal?




Here's a close-up of the tough liner.


Used a Metal Writing Pen to mark up where to drill my holes. In this instance, it's a 1" hole measured 2" from the bottom of the drum.




Using the Harbor Freight Weed Burner to take off the outside paint. The Turbo mode makes quick work of the outside paint. It's not tough enough to get all of the red liner, though. You can really see how uneven the top rib is with this pic.




Here I am loading up the barrel for a big burn. This was mostly old pine, since that's what my friend wanted to get out of his yard. While this looks like a lot of wood, you're going to want a lot more than this to burn out the red liner. You can see how the liner is somewhat powdery - the weed burner was able to do some damage to the liner and if I did a wash/scrape before the fire it would look a little cleaner.




After all of the burning, pressure washing, and wire brush, it's time to paint. First, I hit the drum with high temp primer. On this drum, I am doing the bottom in Orange.
For anybody who wants to know, it's about 1.5 cans of spray paint per drum.




Here I am fitting the old Weber kettle lid to the drum. The rubber mallet mod has you flatten out the lid on a hard surface like concrete, and then re-form it to the drum. This drum has a thick lip, so I've been partially successful with this. I may end up grinding down the lip or using a ring from the old kettle when I feel like re-modding the smokers.




On my last scheduled build day, it started to rain on me while I was painting. So this guy is half painted so far. I also plan to double back and add more conduit nuts to better keep the nipple pipe together. Right now they are not air tight. When I re-do the pipes, I'll finish up the painting, too.



Here are the two charcoal baskets. The Expanded Metal was done shaped and welded by a friend. It's 16" in diameter, and then I used stainless steel fasteners to attach them to the 16.5" Charcoal grates from two Weber OTS kettles. One basket uses bolts to raise the basket 2" off the ground. The other uses fasteners.

FYI - This design will hold 20lbs of Kingsford no problem. These have about 17-18lbs in them.




Here's my tri-color UDS ready for it's maiden voyage. I larded it down really good with cheap, generic vegetable shortening. It will never be so nice and shiny ever again! lol




This thermometer was left outside when it rained on me. You can see that it's all fogged up. I guess that I need to take this guy apart to get the moisture out of there.

FYI - I went with 3" dials, and think they look really good on the Ugly Drum Smoker.




Wifey suggested that I not let an active smoker go to waste, so we had some Atomic Buffalo Turds. This was the first time that we ever made them. DW prefers to chop off the top, stuff and wrap them, and then line them up on a flat skewer to keep them from losing the cream cheese.




I also threw on a piece of Top Round (London Broil). This isn't a traditional BBQ cut, but it still came out pretty darn good. The moisture from the meat combined with the rub to make a sweet sauce, and the drier meat had more concentrated flavor. Overall, not bad!

Lookin good, trza!! Keep on smokin!!:thumb: :thumb:

Great looking drum!! Cooks as good as it looks, I'm sure!

I've read most of this thread. I built a standard, basic UDS with a ball vale on bottom and flat lid w/ 3/4" holes in top. My fire basket is 13.5" round an my grate is 24" above. No water pan or defuser or anything fancy. I need to post pictures, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I've read over and over that the outside of the drum is ~30* hotter than the middle. Well, after my first pork butt took way too long to cook, I checked my Spicewine and Maverick thermometer in boiling water. Both were dead on 212*. Tonight I did a fatty. The Spicewine on the side, about 1" below the grate was nearly exactly the same to 5* hotter than the Maverick was reading in the middle of the grate stuck in a potato about 1/2" above the grate.

I'm more than happy with this results. I'm just trying to get an correlation between the side and the center, so I can stop worrying about the thermometer in the middle. But, I'm left scratching my head since its almost a scientific law that the middle is hotter. Maybe I'm just lucky?

---k--- said:

I've read most of this thread. I built a standard, basic UDS with a ball vale on bottom and flat lid w/ 3/4" holes in top. My fire basket is 13.5" round an my grate is 24" above. No water pan or defuser or anything fancy. I need to post pictures, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I've read over and over that the outside of the drum is ~30* hotter than the middle. Well, after my first pork butt took way too long to cook, I checked my Spicewine and Maverick thermometer in boiling water. Both were dead on 212*. Tonight I did a fatty. The Spicewine on the side, about 1" below the grate was nearly exactly the same to 5* hotter than the Maverick was reading in the middle of the grate stuck in a potato about 1/2" above the grate.

I'm more than happy with this results. I'm just trying to get an correlation between the side and the center, so I can stop worrying about the thermometer in the middle. But, I'm left scratching my head since its almost a scientific law that the middle is hotter. Maybe I'm just lucky?

Click to expand...

Seems to me that sticking your thermometer in a potato would cool down the probe. That is, until the potato has been cooked enough to become the same temp as the air around it.

Yeah, the temps were the same after an hour. I think the potato was cooked at that point. I've read that the potato was the way to go, because it was supposedly bad to leave the probe on a metal grate. maybe that is just internet lore?

Nice drum brother!