New Smoker! With Pics

Well we finally got our new smoker this weekend. Sunday we drove up to NC, spent the night and Monday morning picked up our new baby and towed her home. Its a custom built offset (Bill the grill guy built it) that basically uses a Fisher wood stove for the fire box and a propane tank for the cooking chamber. Its about the size of a Lang 60 (cooking grate is 24x54). Its a solid unit that will be a good step up for us as our hoby has turned from backyard cooking to comps and now we are in the process of starting a catering company.

We will be making some mods to it as time and $$ allow. Right now we know it needs a second shelf which shouldn't be too hard to do or costly, but it needs some sort of tunning plates which might cost some $$. It has a baffle that runs 70% of the length of the cooker that has 1" holes drilled in it along the way. This helps, but it still has a hot spot we'd like to take care of as we would like to be able to do near capacity cooks without having to rotate so much and worry about burning/drying out meat in one section.

I cooked some St. Louis style ribs and a picnic on it. The ribs were some of the best I've done in a long time. Cooked at 250-275 2 hours open, one in the foil and 30-45minutes back out in the pitt sauced to let the sauce firm up. Very tender and great flavor. The picnic I pulled off about 2 hrs short of being done and placed in my oven double wrapped. (I wanted to go to bed) I set the oven timer to finish off the picnic and went to bed planning on pulling in the morning when I got up. I think I messed up the timer and the oven ran at 220 all night long.:icon_blush: The picnic read about 208 internal and was really over cooked. Still eadible and all, just over cooked. But that's my fault.

Here are some pics of the cooker. It was filthy when we got it, looked like the sellar hadn't cleaned it out in over a year.

The first pic is my old offset. It's a brisket machine, and I'll still cook on it, but we were in bad need of a bigger better cooker.

Ya, we were told it had a small "name plate" on it that had Bill the builder and original owner's name on it. We were shocked to find his name weld/drawn on the whole back of the cooking chamber.

We're taking bets on how long it will take for someone to ask us, 'which one of you guys is Bill'

Yup, the weight being on one side does bother us. One of the first things we noticed actually. We already have plans to put a wood basket and some other weighty mods to the other side to try and help balance everything out.

Actually it towed very well. We took it from Winston-Salemn NC to Birmingham Al, a 500 mile trip and had no problems.

The guy we bought it from said the most he had cooked at one time was 17 large butts. He said there was still room on the pitt with those 17 on there, he was avoding the one hotspot on it. That's why I want to put some sort of tuning plate system in it. It's got room for about 20 butts, or 10 packer briskets but do to hot spot you couldn't cook at capacity without a whole lot of rotating.