newbie

Welcome to the Brethren. You might want to go over to Cattle Call and introduce yourself to get a proper welcome.:biggrin:

Being that you are from Texas and can weld, an offset horizontal might be what you are looking to build. With that design, the fire is in a smaller chamber and the meat is in a larger chamber.

It is not typical to grill as part of true barbecue. Rather, we mostly cook meat at low heat over a long period of time.

Most of us have the type of smokers we use listed on our signatures. Snoop around a little and do some google searches to find out about what they are an how they work.

Welcome!
We cook with smoke. Low and Slow. 12-22 hours of love and patience.

Download the Bandera 101 and you will see where this whole thing started. If you can, build your own. You can buy a nice cheap one to learn. Thats is where lots of us started. Then it gets in your blood, and all hell breaks loose. Pretty soon you have a backyard full of cookers and a bunch of neighbors wanting scraps!

My opinion is go find a food grade drum and build a UDS.
Fantastic cooker. And under 50 if you get a free drum.

Google off set smoker go to image see all types there

Google Prairie BBQ and look that site over well.Theres about any kind of smoker that you could want being built there.While you wont find blueprints or materail lists if you read enuff of the threads you will find all the info you need to build and tune a nice cooker for your self.