Mod questions

Most of the little offsets like that do leak a lot of smoke. You can put some foil around where your door closes to help seal it some. I personally don't worry too much about it. It's more important to learn how to keep the temps in you cooking area under control than to seal all the little leaks IMHO.

Try building a small fire in your firebox, put the probe of a remote thermometer through a potato and lay it on you cooking grate and see what kind of temp you are getting. It will probably be much different than what you are seeing on that thermometer on the door. Open and close your firebox dampers and see what it does to your probe temps. Moving your coals closer or further from the firebox/cook chamber opening will also change you grate temps. Adding a small pan of water on the cook grate directly above the opening can help even temps out some. When you think you have it where you can control your temps, try cooking a fatty or a chicken and see how it goes.

Have fun with your toy

Not that it will solve your leakage problem, but I'd work up a fast and cheap baffle to give you more room to go low 'n' slow in your pit. The fire out of the fire box will render a large part of the left side of your grates useless for anything but grilling.

Don't be intimidated. There isn't a better way to get to know your pit than tackling some mods on it. Jump right in. Unless your cutting something off or welding something on you can't really do much damage.

And besides how can you go wrong with 5,000 brethren standing right beside you.

I'd seriously recommned the mods in the link previously posted. I know the ones tailored toward the Bandera were tons of help. Also, I would recommend possbily finding a tube or 2 of high heat silicon and use it to create a gasket of sorts along the length of the smoke chamber door area. Use a cleaning wheel and remove about 1/2 -1 inch of paint from around the entire area of the door edge and clean up the metal good to allow a proper seat, then run a bead of that HiTemp silicone over the cleaned metal. You can either allow it to sit up that way or,....

Apply a thin layer of vasoline to the opposite area of the smoke chamber and then close the lid down to allow the silicone to form to the chamber area. It's a pain to remove the vasoline after the silicone has setup but after a few hours of curing time(do not move the lid after you close it) the Vasoline will prevent the silicone from sticking to the opposite sid eand you will have a nicely formed seal whenever you close the lid.

That may help a little bit, along with the baffle and the draft tube extension.

There's others here that have ALOT MORE experience doing this stuff than I do. Hopefully they'll shime in later.