The stainless basket is 9" in diameter, so I brought some 9" plates out to the PBC to see how they would fit. You can see from the pic that they would take up quite a bit of real estate. I'm still curious to try it since I generally only do 1 pork shoulder at a time, but the size of the basket would indeed make it impossible to do more than 2 in this way. Still, at only $10.00, it's cheaper than buying a split grate, which is the only other way I can think of to do a cook with pork shoulder (which needs a grate) and ribs (which doesn't).
I think I might have another idea of how to hang my butts. See the picture below. I took a 4' piece of 1/8" stainless steel cable, and formed it into a loop. Then for some reason I thought it would be interesting to put a ferrule in the middle to make it a double loop (I'm pretty sure it's unnecessary and possible counterproductive). The wire is a stainless 1/8" 7/7 (seven strands of 7 wires each). It's good for a 1960 lb load, which is probably sufficient for most pork butts I cook, even with a over-engineering fudge factor applied
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You basically just put the butt on top of the cable, then pass one loop through the other hang off of that. One of the nice features of doing it this way is that it's basically a noose, that self cinches, so that when the pork butt cooks down and shrinks, the cable just tightens up around it. Here is a pic of a 6lb test duck to see how it works. Here's a picture of it of the duck hanging in the PBC. I think it's 10x more secure than hooks, and the surface area of the cable is so large there is no way it's going to sink through the bark.
Another intriguing possibility would be to daisy-chain 2 together so that you could hang 2 pork butts per chain, one below the other. That could let me cook 8 pork butts at a time, or some absurd variation of 4 butts, and 4 racks of ribs (not something I foresee doing however!)
I think it'll work great! Now I've got to figure out what to do with the other 100' of cable. I probably don't need 25 butt slings...