Rusty Pup's First UDS Build

I went down to the local scrap metal dealer this morning and grabbed 2 pieces of heavy expanded steel. I was looking for 3/4" 9 gauge, and found out they mainly sell full 4' X 8' sheets of the stuff. I told him what I wanted (a piece about 8" - 12" wide and maybe 48" long, and he pointed me to the "small pieces" rack and told me to see what they had. I walked over and the first two things that jumped out at me were 2 pieces of very heavy expanded steel, both 48" long, one 9" wide, and the other 11" wide. I asked how much they wanted for them, and was told $1.00 per pound. I snagged both pieces and took them over to be weighed so I could pay for them. They totaled 10 lbs, so $10 later, I was on my way home again. I was gone a total of 20 minutes.

My luck ran out shortly after that, however, when I tried to bend this heavy stuff. O. M. G! Never again! I got home with the steel at about 10:00 am. I finally got my charcoal basket wired together at 3:00 pm. That's 5 hours spent trying to bend a 4' long piece of steel into a circle.

I've been reading the Mother of All UDS Threads since the day I signed up on this forum (I'm currently on page 508,) and I can tell you that I either got some seriously heavy steel, I'm a lot older and weaker than I thought, or it's made of Kryptonite. "Oh just bend it around a propane tank," goes the conventional wisdom. Yeah - right. Not with this stuff.

I'm out of money for the UDS this month, so I kind of made due on my charcoal basket for right now. Next month, I'll take the other piece of expanded steel to a few metal fabrication shops and see what they'll charge me to put it on the slip roller and shape it for me. Then I'll ask my neighbor to weld it up for me (I don't think he's bought his own beer since I moved in.)

So - right now, I'm getting everything together to fire it up and do a seasoning run and see if I can learn how to control the temps. I have some el cheapo store brand charcoal to fire up for the seasoning run - after that I'll use the better quality stuff. I just couldn't see paying for good quality stuff just to season it and not cook anything.

Film at 11...

My lesson learned? Pay the pro when you don't have the right tools to do a job. Five hours is way, way too much time to spend on a simple thing like this, no matter how cheap I am.

Yleekyoti said:

Looking good !! Just fyi , those step bits can be sharpened

Click to expand...

Sweet! Thanks for that! I'm sure i'll need that done down the road.

I fired up 12 of the el cheapo briquettes in my chimney and dumped the rest of the bag into the basket. When they chimney was ready, I poured them into the basket, on top of the unlit, and dropped it into the UDS. I don't have a good thermo yet, so I put the Weber grate on and set our oven thermo on it and put on the Weber lid. I watched the temp through the Weber vent holes, and put one cap back on the nipple at about 180°. I put the other on at 200°, and closed the ball valve about half way at about 225°.

I've had it fired up for about an hour now, and I'm keeping track of temps and times. It's cruising along right now at about 260° and I have the two caps on and the ball valve open about 1/2 way - vent on the Weber lid open all the way, as it will stay when I'm cooking. I'll let it go for another half hour and check it again. If I'm within about 10° of that 260°, I'll leave it alone and give it another half hour. If it's not, I'll adjust the valve a bit and give it another half hour. If it's good, I'll call the first test good and open up the intakes to get it up to about 400° for seasoning purposes.

Don't know if you can tell or not in this pic, but there is thin blue in my driveway... :becky:

No lessons learned yet - I'm still learning...

Temp was 250° at 4:30 and 5:00 pm - rock steady. I think I just need to catch my temps coming up a little quicker (say maybe 170° next time) and I can keep it humming along at 250°. At 5:00 I opened the ball valve all the way and took the caps off of the nipples, and it jumped up to 300° in 10 minutes. Gonna check it again at 5:30, and if it's at 400° or more, I'll cap the nipples up, adjust the valve to half-way again, and let it simmer for about 30 minutes to season it, then I'll shut everything up to let it die out.

I have to say that I'm actually very impressed with how easy this drum is to control. I know, I know - the Mother of All UDS Thread is full of success stories. I'm just happy to see that it works for me in real life just as easily as it does for other folks.

Lesson learned? Some things are just as easy as advertised.

OK, it all went as planned. It got up to 400° at about 5:40, and I let it cruise until about 6:10, then capped the nipples, shut the valve and exhaust vents. Now we'll see how long it takes to die out. So far so good!