Anybody ever built a smoker?

[Ventureless]

SO I have a big trailer mounted cooker that I got for free. I have used it for several pigs and they have turned out great. I want to start upgrading the cooker and then I will sandblast and give it a nice coat of paint. I recently bought a small electric smoker and it makes life much easier. So here is my thought about what to do with my whole pig cooker. Any advice or feedback would be welcomed!! Just to give an idea of how big the cooker is, the pic with the pig inside shows a 110 pounder and it only takes up about half the chamber.

 

As you can see in the pic (when I first pulled it out of the weeds at my buddy’s shop), it is basically a huge propane tank mounted on a rolling frame. No firebox so I just pile up charcoal in the ends to cook with. Works good but a pain in the a^^. At one time it had a pipe burner for propane running up the center. It would need all new components to make that work again.

 

So I am thinking of welding together a small fire box with 2 good sized tubes coming out from the sides. I want to mount it in the center bottom portion with the 2 tubes coming into the sides of the bottom to let heat and smoke up to the cooking chamber. Then I would like to get either 1 or 2 cheap or free working electric kitchen stoves and pull the oven burners and control boards out and install them in the cooker. That way I can use the heating elements to help regulate the heat better and keep a more steady temp. The cooking chamber although only singe wall holds heat pretty well as is so I think with 1 or 2 oven burners and a small fire box, it would do the trick and make smoking for 12 hours or so a breeze.

[Marcarl]

It's not going to be easy to replace the heat generated by charcoal in the pot. That is some very hot stuff, and generates more heat than you might think. 2 elements are not going to do that trick.

My thought would be to leave the charcoal in the smoker,,, adds to the flavoring, and then add 1 pipe that leads to a small smoke generator. You won't need much smoke really. The idea of smoking takes a relatively short time. First the item needs to be surface dry, but not sealed by heat. Then the smoke can be added and the item will take on smoke until the outside surface seals, then it's over, at least for the intended destination of the inside yummies. Hence many folks like to do a cold smoke, so less than 100 degrees. Takes longer for the outside to seal and you get more smoke into the real meat.

So when you insert the piggie and you want it to take on smoke you first need to dry the surface, for if the surface is not dry it will evaporate the moisture to the environment and as the moisture is leaving nothing much is going to approach the skin,, it's kind of like a one way street, it's either coming off or going on, but not both.

So to do this well,,,, first let the meat warm up, leave it out so that it gets warm, even dry on the outside, then put it into the cooker and apply smoke, the less heat you insert into the cooker the better, so an exterior smoke generator is needed, you might even go so far as to cool the inlet tube to keep the temp down inside the cooker. Ten minutes will give you a light smoke flavor, 60 minutes will give you more, but more than likely you'll only get about 30 minutes of effective smoking. Once the smoking is done, cook it anyway you like, the flavouring process is all done.

[Ventureless]

I am fine with the smoke for flavoring. I have done plenty of pigs on the big cooker now and also have a small charcoal and now a small electric smoker as well. What I am trying to do is to make the cooking process less labor intensive. I will add a firebox to the bottom of the cooking chamber with inlet tubes to let the heat from the charcoal or wood into the chamber as well as the smoke for flavoring. My thought was to add the oven elements to the interior sides of the cooking chamber to help regulate the temp easier. Not that I am lazy when it comes to food. I just want to be able to walk away for a couple hours to go to my kids soccer games or whatever and not worry that temp will drop to low.