Offset Smoker Build.

IMHO you only need one thermo to use as a reference. Once you know your cooker, you will know the temp zones/differences. Buy using a few oven style ones placed on grates where you will know more about what temps are and where.
Soon you won't need the extra thermos.
Also by using your hand over top of the exh stack you should be able to know what the cooking temp is no matter how much meat you put on. If that makes sense.
IHMO, there is a problem with to much draft. You can pull thru so much air so fast, you are not allowing the smoke to surround and kiss the meat. The smoke is supposed to draft by. Not go zipping by like it is under pressure. And you burn alot more wood for no reason. But that is me.
 
Plus too much draft can put a lot of ash on your food. Not very appealing.
 
I like the chargriller thermometer placement. I always try to have them just above the racks, and having two like that will be good.
 
ebijack said:
IHMO, there is a problem with to much draft. You can pull thru so much air so fast, you are not allowing the smoke to surround and kiss the meat. The smoke is supposed to draft by. Not go zipping by like it is under pressure.
Click to expand...

I would love to see a real world smoker that has this problem. The smoke chamber would have to be very small relative to the chimney, the fire way too big, and the input air completely uncontrolled.

I’ll qualify my statement. If you have a competent pit master running anything close to a normal pit, you won’t have too much draft from a chimney less than 20 feet tall.

Too much airflow? Build a smaller fire and or dial back the intake control. I know it is fashionable on this forum to run stick burners wide open, and you certainly can do it that way, but if wind and weather suggest dialing back the flow rate, dial it back. On most smokers with a reasonable size fire, there is a huge range between wide open and closed too much to cause smoldering. Find it, use it, become a pit master and not just a pit spectator.
 
I have a feeling this will be a much different experience to my Chargriller.

So...I've lit a fire, just using some really dry/old fence posts. At the start, the white smoke was pouring out of the smokestack and door. Once it got going, there was a clear haze coming from the smoke stack. Any smoke that was coming through the door either got pulled through the chimney or was so faint that I couldn't see it. Tried to get a photo to capture it but it could hardly be seen.

Flames were being drawn into the cook chamber. It's pulling really well. I didn't adjust the dampeners (left wide open) and it quickly got up to about 570 degrees F (which my cheap thermometer topped out at).

I'm pretty sure my Chargriller would have melted if I tried that in it.

The fire died a bit and it was hovering around 350-400. Once I start it with a chimney of coals and use my usual timber (red gum), I'm confident that the temps will hold quite steady when I workout the right size fire. The steel is nearly 7mm thick and is radiating a lot of heat. It'll take some time to learn how to run it well but it should turn into a good cooking experience.

The last thing I need to make for it is a baffle or tuning plate. I thought I'd wait to see how the first couple of burns went. I've got a few strips of plate steel I used in my Chargriller that I'll play around with.

Once I've had a few practice burns, I'll install thermometers and get it sandblasted ready for painting.

Thanks for everyone's comments and advice so far.
 

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Looks like a winner!!!


Nice work!
 
Awesome job! Got to be a great feeling to get it up and running from scratch. So cool
 
m-fine said:
I would love to see a real world smoker that has this problem. The smoke chamber would have to be very small relative to the chimney, the fire way too big, and the input air completely uncontrolled.

I’ll qualify my statement. If you have a competent pit master running anything close to a normal pit, you won’t have too much draft from a chimney less than 20 feet tall.

Too much airflow? Build a smaller fire and or dial back the intake control. I know it is fashionable on this forum to run stick burners wide open, and you certainly can do it that way, but if wind and weather suggest dialing back the flow rate, dial it back. On most smokers with a reasonable size fire, there is a huge range between wide open and closed too much to cause smoldering. Find it, use it, become a pit master and not just a pit spectator.
Click to expand...

My experience, you can only build/have so small of fire. The fire can only be so far from the intake and the cook chamber. I never mentioned running the intake wide open. There is a controllable intake. I never run anywhere near wide open intake except on some brand smokers. And at start up. Again, you have to be able to control the air. And the smoker has to draft well. Just not like a hurricane.
Or you have draft problems like mentioned often with one big name brand pit. The main problem I believe was the intake is above the fire.
Don't know where you get 20 ft from. Arron Franklin enlarged the dia of his stacks and increased the height/length for his 1000 gal smokers to get better flow.
Pretty easy to find out if you want to. Add an extra 3 or so feet to the top of your offset smoke stack. Just cheap hvac piping. And see the difference.
I'm guessing most every quality pit builder has experimented with both dia and length to get a good flow rate. It's all about proper airflow and control.
Balance, not excess and not poor flow.
But again, that is my experience.
 
Has anyone on this forum or any other bbq forum ever complained about their smoker drafting too much? It's always the other way around: "fire smolders when I close the firebox door"...."need to cook with firebox door open or fire smolder"..."need expanded metal on firebox grate to maintain a coal bed that will ignite next log"..."need to prewarm the hell out of next split so it'll catch quickly"..."cut your splits down to the size of a matchstick so it'll burn properly"..."gotta maintain a big coal bed"..."white smoke pouring out stack"...."smoke is coming out of the intake"..."smoke direction in pit reverses with wind gusts." All signs pointing toward poor draft.

On the other hand, "pulls like a freight train"..."drafts like a hurricane/tornado" are complimentary terms in every post I've ever read. What you end up with is a well-stoked fire and thin blue smoke all day. If you have high temps, decrease fire size, distance of fire to chamber, intake, stack damper....then lastly stack height if all the above fails.
 
ebijack said:
My experience, you can only build/have so small of fire. The fire can only be so far from the intake and the cook chamber. I never mentioned running the intake wide open. There is a controllable intake. I never run anywhere near wide open intake except on some brand smokers. And at start up. Again, you have to be able to control the air. And the smoker has to draft well. Just not like a hurricane.
Or you have draft problems like mentioned often with one big name brand pit. The main problem I believe was the intake is above the fire.
Don't know where you get 20 ft from. Arron Franklin enlarged the dia of his stacks and increased the height/length for his 1000 gal smokers to get better flow.
Pretty easy to find out if you want to. Add an extra 3 or so feet to the top of your offset smoke stack. Just cheap hvac piping. And see the difference.
I'm guessing most every quality pit builder has experimented with both dia and length to get a good flow rate. It's all about proper airflow and control.
Balance, not excess and not poor flow.
But again, that is my experience.
Click to expand...

The 20 feet was an absurdly large number for a trailer smoker but medium to short length for a commercial installation or even a fireplace. From an engineering/science perspective, the idea that a smoker chimney could be 6”-12” too tall is laughably absurd!

If you have a 20+ foot chimney on an indoor smoker in a climate that gets well below freezing, yes you could get too much draft and then GASP! you might have to shut a damper. Oh the humanity!!!

On the other hand, if you listen to the people who say cut it shorter, on a hot day with funky wind, you may not have enough draft and now you are hauling out a welder to fix what never should have been broken in the first place.

I have yet to see a trailer/patio smoker design where the draft was too strong to be controlled without cutting the chimney. It is a problem than only exists in theory batted around on Internet forums.
 
m-fine said:
I have yet to see a trailer/patio smoker design where the draft was too strong to be controlled without cutting the chimney. It is a problem than only exists in theory batted around on Internet forums.
Click to expand...

That is because you have probably not been involved in designing and building a new pit.
You are talking production pits that have been designed and tested.
I'm out
 
I'm getting some consistency after a few practice burns.

The first burn was erratic. I loaded up one chimney full of briquettes and put a split on top. Temps were all over the place. Partly (I think) that my coal base was spread out.

I made a basket out of leftover mesh and tried in that. Same sort of thing. Erratic temps. I welded up a spacer sort of thing that meant I could reduce the size of the basket to make a smaller size fire but the coals would be heaped in one area.

For this burn, I added one full lit chimney of briquettes to a similar amount of unlit briqs and added a split on top of the basket. Took about 25 mins to get to 300F. I adjusted the vents a few times (intake to about 1/8ths open and exhaust to about 2/3rds open. The temp zone was around 285-310 over two hours. I added a preheated split after an hour and it kept chugging along in that zone. To bring it down, I could've adjusted the exhaust more but the fire was burning nicely and I didn't want to choke it.

8pm - started fire
8.25 - temp at 300f
9.15 - new preheated split - temp at 285f
10.10 - temp at 289f
10.20 - temp at 275f - needed another piece of timber

I let it go out after that.

Gonna cook some ribs this weekend to see how it goes on a longer burn. Looking at brisket recipes and videos that cook in the 275-300f range. Maybe a slightly smaller fire would help reduce the temp without having to close up the intake and exhaust dampeners.
 

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Sounds like you're starting to get it dialed in nicely! If you can hold temps like that it should be right about perfect! Great job on the build!!
 
Congrats!
Yes, you should try smaller splits. Maybe even down to beer can size.
Lots of experimenting for you to do.
 
More smaller splits and less charcoal. Charcoal doesn’t heat an offset well or consistently, only use it to get the first splits burning. I start with a bunch of wood (4-5 pieces?) to get the smoker up to temp and form a coal bed and then add one or two at a time after that to maintain. The cook chamber may be well over my target temp during the initial burn, but that’s Ok, because it will come back down fairly quickly. I plan 60-90 minutes from fire light to food on, which is usually busy with prep work anyway.

Also, add a new split before the temp starts to drop or when it just starts to. It is easy to get behind a stick burner and then you lose your coal bed. That makes the new wood slower to catch and your overal temp control less stable.

Speaking of stable, don’t fret over it. 20-30 degrees swings high or low are the norm and the meat won’t complain.
 
You will get the hang of it! I have figured out on mine, it is about a split every 40 minutes. You will figure it out. Also, I would leave the exhaust wide open and just adjust air flow with the dial and or door. I don’t have a dial, I just use the door ala franklin. Can’t wait to see what you cook this weekend!
 
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