Bud10000
Found some matches.
Hello all! I finally have some pics to share with you! The build is going great and we are rushing through it as quick as we can, just eager to get to cooking!
Last Saturday we had some free time in the evening and my dad was around so I coaxed him into helping Poppy and I lay our flat stock on the doors for seals!
That went pretty smooth but with all the different welding and torching we had been doing the doors seemed to have warped a bit and the flat stock couldn’t seal completely. So we took the torch and started warming areas of the door, placed a 2X4 inside the door, and beat the living snot out of it with a sledgehammer!
My dad tried teaching me as a kid that a hammer is never the right tool but I swear it’s the first tool we always reach for anyway! We only finished the right door that night but went scavenging for more parts, more on this later! Wednesday Poppy and I finished the door trim and it came out looking like this.
Then we cut out a squarish…. hole for the collector to go into.
Cutting that “square” was awful, I used the cutting disc and man it was just a pain. If I ever build another one of these things I will definitely be looking for a plasma cutter first!
Now back to the scavenging. Poppy has a junk pile that is full of metal. It’s been on his farm my entire life, there used to be an old car sunk into the middle of it that me and my cousins would play in when we were children. Dangerous? Absolutely but there you have it. Anyway, he has cleaned and parts of this pile over the years and made a pretty penny when he has but when dad and I were talking about what we needed for the smoke stack and the collector he led us out to his pile, that’s very overgrown with briars and trees at this point, and wades out into the mess of it saying “There’s a metal box somewhere over here we can use for the collector.” And sure enough not three minutes later we find it in the general area he said we would. Then he takes us back around to the opposite side and says “I put a metal tube right there 20 years ago that’ll be perfect for the smokestack.” This area was too grown up to get into so we had to put off looking until we got a bush-hog attached to a tractor.
So knowing roughly where all of the components to the smokestack were we cut out the piece he wanted to use for the collector and welded it into that pathetic hole I cut. It looked better than I expected and that wrapped up our Wednesday.
Thursday came and we started off by getting the bush-hog going and clearing a path to where he thought the cylinder would be and after 20 years of putting it there he was only wrong on how long it was. He said it was 20 feet but in reality it was 11, but to his credit it was right where he said it would be so I give him half credit. The diameter was 6 inches so I plugged that into my calculator and it said to make the chimney 24 inches. We immediately ignored this and made a 4 foot smock stack on top of the foot or so collector we had already attached.
It looks fantastic in my opinion! Here’s a pic of the entire smokestack and collector completed, also a sneak peak of the trailer we put the smoker on!
I get bad for taking this long on the build and wanted to get the smoker out of Poppy’s shop so we went ahead and lifted the smoker in the air and pushed the trailer under it. We didn’t have any legs on it yet so it wasn’t very sturdy but we left it for the night. Or so I thought!
I head out to the shop this morning and see the entire smoker on its side on the trailer and panic for a brief second but then see that Poppy has payed it over, propped it up, marked the middle of the underbelly of the smoker, cut some metal I had found in his scrap pile for legs, marked the middle of those and was ready to weld them on when I finished working. He’d done that the night before while he was waiting to catch an armadillo that’s been breaking into his garden!
So it doesn’t take us long to level up the legs and weld them onto the bottom of the smoker and raise it back into its right position. So since we have time we pull another piece of metal out of the scrap pile that we think could work for the grill grates!
The length of our angle iron that will hold the grates up is 80 inches and the space between the front and back is 23.5 inches. This piece of metal is 86 inches long by 24 inches wide. Nearly perfect! So we cut off a bit of the length and width and cut it into 3 smaller pieces and viola! We have grates!
So while we still have a few small things to do like add a damper, put in a drain, paint it, and do a burn out, the last big thing we have to build and attach is the firebox! We cleaned up the shop and pulled the smoker out of his way and seeing it outside on the trailer just got me pumped up all over agin!
So that’s where we are at as of today! The smoker is on the trailer and technically could almost be used as a grill if I had an airflow cut out to keep the fire going. After we finished the smokestack Poppy had to start a small fire with cardboard and paper towels to see if it would draw. We lite it up and left the right door cracked about an inch so it could breath and almost immediately smoke and heat started coming out of the stack! We didn’t really see any smoke coming out of the doors until we choked the fire and got a ton of smoke that started coming out all over the place so we will see what it does when the firebox is going.
One last funny thing I wanted to share was that before we started working on it last Saturday we had all just eaten dinner at my grandparents and were sitting in the living room talking when out of no where Poppy turns to me and asks “Do you really think that smoker is going to work?” He had been doing all this work with me and didn’t even believe it would work! He’s only ever seen grills and the like so I showed him some different videos of places like Aaron Franklins restaurant and all the different builds people have all over the place. I’m not sure he is thoroughly convinced yet but hopefully it’ll work and he will be pleasantly surprised!
Last Saturday we had some free time in the evening and my dad was around so I coaxed him into helping Poppy and I lay our flat stock on the doors for seals!
That went pretty smooth but with all the different welding and torching we had been doing the doors seemed to have warped a bit and the flat stock couldn’t seal completely. So we took the torch and started warming areas of the door, placed a 2X4 inside the door, and beat the living snot out of it with a sledgehammer!
My dad tried teaching me as a kid that a hammer is never the right tool but I swear it’s the first tool we always reach for anyway!
We only finished the right door that night but went scavenging for more parts, more on this later! Wednesday Poppy and I finished the door trim and it came out looking like this.
Then we cut out a squarish…. hole for the collector to go into.
Cutting that “square” was awful, I used the cutting disc and man it was just a pain. If I ever build another one of these things I will definitely be looking for a plasma cutter first!
Now back to the scavenging. Poppy has a junk pile that is full of metal. It’s been on his farm my entire life, there used to be an old car sunk into the middle of it that me and my cousins would play in when we were children. Dangerous? Absolutely but there you have it. Anyway, he has cleaned and parts of this pile over the years and made a pretty penny when he has but when dad and I were talking about what we needed for the smoke stack and the collector he led us out to his pile, that’s very overgrown with briars and trees at this point, and wades out into the mess of it saying “There’s a metal box somewhere over here we can use for the collector.” And sure enough not three minutes later we find it in the general area he said we would. Then he takes us back around to the opposite side and says “I put a metal tube right there 20 years ago that’ll be perfect for the smokestack.” This area was too grown up to get into so we had to put off looking until we got a bush-hog attached to a tractor.
So knowing roughly where all of the components to the smokestack were we cut out the piece he wanted to use for the collector and welded it into that pathetic hole I cut. It looked better than I expected and that wrapped up our Wednesday.
Thursday came and we started off by getting the bush-hog going and clearing a path to where he thought the cylinder would be and after 20 years of putting it there he was only wrong on how long it was.
He said it was 20 feet but in reality it was 11, but to his credit it was right where he said it would be so I give him half credit. The diameter was 6 inches so I plugged that into my calculator and it said to make the chimney 24 inches. We immediately ignored this and made a 4 foot smock stack on top of the foot or so collector we had already attached.
It looks fantastic in my opinion! Here’s a pic of the entire smokestack and collector completed, also a sneak peak of the trailer we put the smoker on!
I get bad for taking this long on the build and wanted to get the smoker out of Poppy’s shop so we went ahead and lifted the smoker in the air and pushed the trailer under it. We didn’t have any legs on it yet so it wasn’t very sturdy but we left it for the night. Or so I thought!
I head out to the shop this morning and see the entire smoker on its side on the trailer and panic for a brief second but then see that Poppy has payed it over, propped it up, marked the middle of the underbelly of the smoker, cut some metal I had found in his scrap pile for legs, marked the middle of those and was ready to weld them on when I finished working.
He’d done that the night before while he was waiting to catch an armadillo that’s been breaking into his garden!So it doesn’t take us long to level up the legs and weld them onto the bottom of the smoker and raise it back into its right position. So since we have time we pull another piece of metal out of the scrap pile that we think could work for the grill grates!
The length of our angle iron that will hold the grates up is 80 inches and the space between the front and back is 23.5 inches. This piece of metal is 86 inches long by 24 inches wide. Nearly perfect! So we cut off a bit of the length and width and cut it into 3 smaller pieces and viola! We have grates!
So while we still have a few small things to do like add a damper, put in a drain, paint it, and do a burn out, the last big thing we have to build and attach is the firebox! We cleaned up the shop and pulled the smoker out of his way and seeing it outside on the trailer just got me pumped up all over agin!
So that’s where we are at as of today! The smoker is on the trailer and technically could almost be used as a grill if I had an airflow cut out to keep the fire going. After we finished the smokestack Poppy had to start a small fire with cardboard and paper towels to see if it would draw. We lite it up and left the right door cracked about an inch so it could breath and almost immediately smoke and heat started coming out of the stack! We didn’t really see any smoke coming out of the doors until we choked the fire and got a ton of smoke that started coming out all over the place so we will see what it does when the firebox is going.
One last funny thing I wanted to share was that before we started working on it last Saturday we had all just eaten dinner at my grandparents and were sitting in the living room talking when out of no where Poppy turns to me and asks “Do you really think that smoker is going to work?” He had been doing all this work with me and didn’t even believe it would work!
He’s only ever seen grills and the like so I showed him some different videos of places like Aaron Franklins restaurant and all the different builds people have all over the place. I’m not sure he is thoroughly convinced yet but hopefully it’ll work and he will be pleasantly surprised!
