smokers

 Hey Good Buddy,,,it good hearing from you again,,,,, You just don't get on here as often as you need to ,,,,,,what??you tryin to ease out of here like ole Les done,,,????

 I sure miss ole les and his humorous ways,,,,are ya listenin,,Leslie,,,????

  Anyway on the smokers thing,,I used to have an electric model and while they are sorta less labor intensive than the wood fired models,,the two I had never did get hot enough for good smokin,,,,,I had a home made  offset with the vertical cooking chamber and I really like'ed it as the meat gets more "uniform" smoke as it RISES from level to level with the outlet at the highest level. I currently have a big Smoky Mountain offset that I added a piece of 1/8" metal plate in the cooking chamber with slots cut in it for better heat and smoke distribution from the area next to the heat inlet  all the way to back side of cooking chamber. It now works better than when new,,altho you still have to rotate the meat from front to back to keep from burning the meat.

 The absolute most necessary requirement for any smoker is temperature regulation that is determined by how "Air Tight" the smoker is and the thickness of the material used to make it,,!! Don't waste your money on those models made of metal so thin it almost feels like beer can material with gaps bigger than chit,,,!! Those are made for the Yuppie group that will try to smoke once and then leave it on the back porch to rust away,,,, One of the best models I've seen is "The Big Green Egg" ,,thet sob is insulated with cast refractory bout 1/2" thick and the whole thing is very heavy,,My 2nd oldest Son has one and he tells me he wouldn't have anything else,!!  BUT,,,that sob cost him like $770,, and guaranteed for life,,,,!! He uses it every other week,,!! Hope this helps,,,,

 Yeah,,Thad,,the last Cook-Off we had here,,I saw 3 of those Oklahoma Joes in competition and two of the Smoky Mountain like I got. Most of the others were some custom made smokers that prolly were in the thousands of dollars,,,but were ALL offsets,,,,!! There were some units there that prolly cost as much as my house,,,,!!

 Gosh,,,Chask,,I just don't see HOW that monstrocity could even hope to work,,,,unless it has multiple fireboxes spaced thru out the whole thing,,,Dang,,can you imagine trying to keep that thing fed,,,,????

  When I was doing a job in Wilburton, Oklahoma, there was a dude that had built one out of an oilfield propane tank that was 20 Ft long and 4Ft diameter,,,,!! He added two fireboxes, one at each end and a big outlet pipe at the center of tank We stopped and visited with him for bout an hour and he told us he would volunteer some Deer meat, briskets and pork shoulders to the Senior center 3-4 times a year and they would volunteer some of the seniors to keep up the wood supply and moving meats,,,!!!! Think he said the tank material was like 3/4" thick so,,once you got it hot,,,it stayed hot,,but the BIG JOB was to keep rotating the meats from end to end,,,,

 That guy wound up giving us a pickup load of Good, Good azzed Oklahoma Oak!!!!