My mini w/ conical charcoal holder and cyclonic heat diffuser (bonus pork shoulder!)

Thanks to all the information I've found here and on a few other forums, I decided to make a mini wsm. I had been smoking for a few years in my horrible horrible propane grill I was given for free, but decided to step it up to charcoal. Call me a romantic, but something about smoking food over a real fire is sexier than just turning a knob and igniting some stinky gas.



I already had a smokey joe so the first thing to do was to procure a 32 qt tamale pot from the local Mexican Grocer. My pot was $29.99, which I found strange as other 32 qt pots were labeled $39.99 and $34.99. I'm not sure which price was right, but I just grabbed the cheapest one, strapped it to my bike and came home.


Just a test fit to make sure I didn't buy the wrong pot.




I cut some L-shaped arcs out of the bottom of the pot and bent them inwards instead of just drilling holes or cutting out the bottom. I was hoping the pattern would encourage a swirly movement of heat throughout the smoker. I haven't necessarily found that to be true, but when I open the pot, I can see the smoke rotating on exit. If some older wiser bbqing gentleman turns me off this idea, I can turn the deflectors into a platform for the drip catcher I'm using. Or worst comes to worst, I can cut them out and be done with this blasted experiment. Pardon the foil, but after I tried cooking without the drip catcher, I made a huge mess and opted against ever cleaning the deflectors again (they are a pain in the butt to clean).

After my first few test cooks, I decided I wanted a charcoal basket. Mostly inspired by this awesome basket, I decided I wanted my basket to flare out instead of being the normal cylinder. Turns out this requires quit a bit of maths. Most of my time spent making this basket was spent on geometry.







I made the maths thumbnails a bit smaller because it's math. I used all these incredibly precise calculations to tie a bit of string I used to trace out my pattern.

As it turns out, I failed to account for the stretchiness of the string and my general ineptitude so the pattern I cut out was just slightly slightly larger than I wanted it to be.


Anyway, after some careful consideration, I decided it would waste the least amount of material to cut out 5 shapes instead of just one. So I did that using a jigsaw, a metal blade and a lot of time and noise. To date, my greatest shortcoming is that I am unable to weld, so I just tied everything together with some stainless steel wire.


The basket actually turned out pretty well... Except that it was slightly slightly too tall and my tamale pot would no longer sit flush.


I ended up bending the tips down with some vise grips. It's not pretty anymore but at least it fits. Also in this pic, you can see I have a second charcoal grate that can sit inside the basket itself. The second grate is the from a smokey joe knockoff and is actually the exact same diameter of the SJS's charcoal grate. I intend to put coals on top of here when I just want to sear a steak so I don't have to waste as much fuel. If there's one thing this project taught me, it is that I am a miser.



After a few burns, it became obvious to me that I would need some way of preventing the ashes from clogging the vent of my sjs. I went looking for some stainless dog bowls at my local stores but could not find any. In the end, I used some scraps from my basket project and some foil to make this thing. It is ugly and I may end up trimming the top a bit, but it has worked well thus far.

To test out the mini wsm, I convinced my lady friend to eat some pulled pork. She's a bit health conscious so this was not easy to do. I texas crutched around 160F internal until about 198 internal. I cooked mostly at 250F, but because of wind and impatience the range was from 200-300F. I will have to block the wind in the future as it really messed with my temps.



I used about 1/2-2/3 a chimny of kingsford competition minion method to get the fire going.


Stay warm little porky.



Sorry about the blurry pic, I was too excited to eat the thing. What you can't really see is the amazing smoke ring. It was so pink and vibrant. Next time I will probably cook to above 200F. I like my meat chewy but the boss likes soft. Still it was so delicious with some home made carolina-style sauce. Wonderfully smokey, but not overpowering. Very very good stuff.

I got about 6 hours of burn time out of 2/3rds a starter of briquettes. This seems low to me. Others have reported 10-12 hour burn times. Perhaps I can convince the lady to eat more BBQ in the future, so I can test out using a bit more coal. Also, I'd like to find a better way to get the thin blue smoke going so I don't waste 1-1.5 hours of cook time on waiting for the billowy white smoke of taste-grossness to disappear.

All in all, I'm very happy with the mini-WSM. If anyone has any pointers for extending the burn time, I'm happy to hear them.

Nice job, thanks for sharing.

Nice build! You don't have to wait for the TBS to appear, sometimes that can take forever. I put the food in immediately after the initial white smoke clears, like with any other smoker........perhaps 15, 20 minutes or so...

And since you have the SJS you can try not using the coal basket. You'll be able to load more coals that way. The SJS works well without the basket.

George L said:

Nice build! You don't have to wait for the TBS to appear, sometimes that can take forever. I put the food in immediately after the initial white smoke clears, like with any other smoker........perhaps 15, 20 minutes or so...

And since you have the SJS you can try not using the coal basket. You'll be able to load more coals that way. The SJS works well without the basket.

Click to expand...

Good to know. I wish I knew that the basket wasn't so necessary before I built it...