DIY drum vertical gyro/al pastor/shawarma/doner kebab

So I was talking to a friend of mine about bbq, and I asked him if there was a food that I could research for him. He thought about it and said he was interested in making tacos al pastor.

That is why my username is al_pastor. I needed a unique username, and it was on my mind.

I learned that the true tacos al pastor are cooked on a trompo, which is just the spanish word (spin) representing a Gyro vertical rotisserie. Many of the taquerias around town do not cook them like this, but I hear in Mexico trompos are everywhere.

Anyway, last night I stumbled on some decent looking instructions for mounting an electric spit vertically in a drum to build a backyard doner kebab grill. I figured I would share it here as I had not seen this before and someone may be interested. The plans are at http://www.jamieoliver.com/jimmybuilds/dks.pdf

I just purchased a WSM rotisserie from cajun bandit and am going to work on a horizontal al pastor. But maybe one day I may try to build this.

Steve

Uh oh, what just got delivered to my house but a brand new 30 gallon unlined closed top steel barrel. I wonder what this will become?

I do not usually name my grills, but if I did this one would be named Donald Trompo. I have a few other parts I want to order and have some design improvements I am thinking on, but I will post pics as things progress. This is a pretty simple build really, no welding or anything so even I should be able to handle up on this one. Although you welders out there really have me thinking about the possibilities of learning.

Steve

Don't worry about the alcohol. I never read the fine print, and would have never seen that in the design pdf.

There is also a video clip of the show at http://www.channel4.com/programmes/...-ep3-build-your-own-doner-kebab/3084586433001 that shows the machine in action.

I looked over the specs of the autodoner they sell at acemart pretty well before I settled on the 30 gallon drum. The commercial autodoner is 17" wide and 32" tall. This barrel is an inch and change wider, and about 4" shorter. The commercial unit can hold a 40 lb meat cone though! I can not imagine that I could possibly need to make anywhere near that much meat!

It was interesting to learn that basically every gyro you ever eat is sold frozen from one company out of chicago. Almost no restaurant in the country makes their own. I've always wondered why the gyros you get no matter where you get them essentially were the same. Sometimes portions were larger or smaller, but that is about it. It will be really neat to make one, and with charcoal to boot. I was thinking for that a boneless leg of lamb, and ribeye combo might be the way to go. Also from what I have read in Greece the gyros are actually most commonly made from pork, not lamb or beef!

Regarding the build thread I figured I would just keep updating this thread.

I am going to use the rotisserie motor from my cajun bandit wsm rotisserie. I ordered a new set of forks, a bearing, a longer 5/16" square spit from onegrill.com. I ordered a motor mount from cajun bandit. I ordered an angle grinder and a metal cutting blade from amazon.

My main design improvement is I want to be able to adjust the distance of the spit from the fire.

I might need to fashion some legs for this thing, but I haven't figured out what I would do for that yet. I am also not sure if I am going to run into trouble with heat and the motor yet. They used a stack of bricks as the insulator, but that just looked too half-baked to me.

I purchased a fairly cheap porter cable angle grinder off amazon and went to work on the tromp this morning before it got too hot. Of course we got too excited and didn't pay any attention to where the bung holes were. They almost were directly in the center we cut. But it looks like it is off center enough. I flipped it upside down so they are on the bottom and they should be plenty out of the way. I thought I did an ok job cutting considering I had never done it before. I need to file the edges down, they are pretty ragged right now.



I learned the hard way why the instructions said to leave at least 2" all the way around. I only did 1.5", and the thing is not very rigid. I used a 2x4 on its short end with a marker on top to make my cutting line across the top and bottom. If I did it again I would stand it up on the long end 2.5" and make the thing more rigid. So, made some mistakes, but nothing seems like it is a game stopper at this point.

Well I will not turn down advice. What would be the best way to clean up the cut edges? I briefliy changed from a cutting blade to a grinding wheel on the grinder, but it seemed like it was still leaving it ragged.

Know any way to make a template of the shape of the charcoal shelves? According to the plan they sit at a 45 degree angle from the rounded backside to the straight across middle cut edges. One idea i had was some giant home made contour gauge. I have a large rafter angle square, so getting the 45 degree angle is a snap, it is just working out the shape of the backside when you approach from 45 degrees above. Hopefully that makes some sense. If you have not looked at the plans pdf it probably will not.

Ok, thanks for the tip on the sander.

I was planning on using expanded metal from home depot. I did cut the drum in half to the best of my ability. I used a piece of string the length of its circumference, then brought the ends together so that it was now half its size. Then i used that to measure where to cut.

The tricky part on the shelves is the front edge which goes feom cut edge to cut edge sits higher there then in the back. The shelves slope down to the rear. This distorts what would be a half circle into half an elipse or something. My math skills are too basic to find this shape easily. According to the wikipedia page for elipse there are several methods for drawing elipses. I will have to study them a bit to see if one of them would work for me.

Inthewoods said:

That is very cool! Thanks for making the thread al_!

I'm going to pick up a 55gal food grade drum from a guy in the morning for my uds build...now I'm going to have to get two

-D

Click to expand...

I'm glad someone else finds it interesting. In the end i think the food will be super interesting. Layers of thin marinated meats roasted on a spit near charcoal. I am imagining that it will be so mich better than what you can buy around here.

But the build is out of my comfort zone, so I am finding that interesting as well. It has been too long since I have challenged myself. It was a nice day, my 3 yo son was out there watching my buddy and I, and he really behaved himself. Real nice day.