Anyone put an ATC on a mini?


 
not yet :rolleyes:
But I have a silver and have toyed with the idea of using conduit to make where I could.
Might also have to have a way to choke down the air flow, the 10cfm fan on my Auber might be too much, although I just bought a PartyQ which has a 6.5cfm fan and might work better.
 
I might try my Guru on it this weekend. I put the damper vents from an 18 in the bottom of mine so it should attach just like on the wsm. The fan I can close off some if necessary.
 
I use my heatermeter 4.0 on my mini for virtually every cook now. Other than a couple of hiccups where I didn't get the pot re-seated on the kettle properly after refueling (which led to temperature runaway), it's been amazing. I can run lump instead of briquettes while still having rock-solid temperatures. That combination lets me get 14+ hours at 250 without needing to refuel or even check it (overnight cooks with unbroken nights of sleep!). I can also run the temp up to 325 and lock it in there for poultry - basically it's taken an already efficient little smoker and made it incredibly flexible too. I even use it to do final searing on steaks and roasts by pulling the steamer pot off, replacing the cooking grate, and running it in manual fan mode at full speed to get an absolutely insanely high-temp sear.
In short, yes, I cook at least once a week on my ATC-equipped mini - some would say it's overkill and the mini is so stable that you don't need it, but I just love being able to simply not worry about temp drift regardless of what is happening with wind or weather (within reason)
 
I don't have any pictures, but I basically emulated the approach taken by the the pitmaster ique series and used a 1qt stainless steel dog bowl, a long stainless bolt a couple of stainless fender washers and a stainless nut - I removed the factory vent control from my smokey joe silver and ran the bolt through a hole in the bolt, put a washer covering the inside of one of the vent holes & put the nut over that. The bowl completely covers all 4 of the vent holes, one of which is blocked by the washer, the rest are open. Originally I cut a hole into the side of the bowl that matched the size of the fan mouth and used a friction fit to hold it in place but have since that time added a servo valve for even more precise control over the airflow and had to redo the mounting hole in the bowl to match the 3/4" copper pipe I'm using for the servo... I tossed out the old bowl when I upgraded to the servo, so I can't go get pictures of that for you, but it was really pretty straightforward. There is a recent thread in the linkmeter forum here that shows a simple and cheap approach that is similar to what I did except it uses a tin can instead of the dog bowl.
 
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