BrewHo
Knows what a fatty is.
It took a lot longer than I expected or planned going in, but I finished putting my New Braunfels Silver Smoker together this afternoon, and this evening fired it up to cure the paint and start seasoning the grills.
Sprayed it with high heat primer during the rebuild, planning a top cost of high heat flat black enamel, but I’ve decided I like the look of the battleship gray primer so will leave it that way at least for now. And gray seems a more appropriate color scheme for the Silver Smoker than black. My one concern is whether the primer will be less durable than the designed top coat, but I figured I’ll see how it holds up and if it starts looking bad I’ll just give it a quick brush and spray with the top coat when needed.
One mod so far. I was also installing the wheels on the Akorn today because the missing axle showed up this morning, and I decided to swap wheels with the NBSS. The Akorn wheels are a little bigger and the NB is much heavier so the swap seemed like a good idea. Luckily the axle diameter is identical so the swap was trivial.
One more mod possibly planned. The stack on the NB is not sealed. Two tack welds on the mounting plate, and two bolts holding the plate to the body. Very noticeable gaps all around as a result. Thinking of putting a length of fiberglass stove gasket around the stack, between the mounting plate and the smoker body, or perhaps just running a bead of RTV around there. The reason I’m not yet sure which I’ll do is that I’ve been thinking of maybe installing some ducting to try to get a reverse flow going, and I want to keep my options open by making it easy to remove the stack if I want to do some work on it in the future. So I’ll spend some time cooking on it as is, will seal it up if it seems like a problem. We’ll see.
Here are today’s photos.
Final assembly almost done.
First fire.
Damped down.
Holding temp.
Sprayed it with high heat primer during the rebuild, planning a top cost of high heat flat black enamel, but I’ve decided I like the look of the battleship gray primer so will leave it that way at least for now. And gray seems a more appropriate color scheme for the Silver Smoker than black. My one concern is whether the primer will be less durable than the designed top coat, but I figured I’ll see how it holds up and if it starts looking bad I’ll just give it a quick brush and spray with the top coat when needed.
One mod so far. I was also installing the wheels on the Akorn today because the missing axle showed up this morning, and I decided to swap wheels with the NBSS. The Akorn wheels are a little bigger and the NB is much heavier so the swap seemed like a good idea. Luckily the axle diameter is identical so the swap was trivial.
One more mod possibly planned. The stack on the NB is not sealed. Two tack welds on the mounting plate, and two bolts holding the plate to the body. Very noticeable gaps all around as a result. Thinking of putting a length of fiberglass stove gasket around the stack, between the mounting plate and the smoker body, or perhaps just running a bead of RTV around there. The reason I’m not yet sure which I’ll do is that I’ve been thinking of maybe installing some ducting to try to get a reverse flow going, and I want to keep my options open by making it easy to remove the stack if I want to do some work on it in the future. So I’ll spend some time cooking on it as is, will seal it up if it seems like a problem. We’ll see.
Here are today’s photos.
Final assembly almost done.
First fire.
Damped down.
Holding temp.
