"Hello, has anyone used the WSM Extended Rack support kit from Cajuin Bandit?
https://www.cajunbandit.com/product...er-smokey-mountain-extended-rack-support-kit/
How does this work? Does it lower the water pan to provide 6" from rack to rack?"
I have this on my 18 and like it a lot, with a few caveats.
At $70 (including an additional upgraded top cooking grate), it isn't cheap -- although way cheaper than getting a stacker or a second cooker. Provides a nice solid third grate with each grate being evenly and nicely spaced out. Screws right in, so no drilling or McGyvering required. Now the caveats:
In the 18, it does lower the water pan bracket several inches. The 18 already has an issue with the overly deep stock water pan and these brackets make that worse. The lowest point of the stock water pan goes below the top level of the charcoal ring. Because the stock pan angles in, you can still add coals or chunks to the chamber through the door with tongs. But if you pile the charcoal up high for a minion start, the bowl can actually touch the charcoal pile. So in the 18, you'll probably move on from the stock water pan and go with the Brinkmann, pizza pan, flower pot base, Hunsaker or FireDial (which is what I use). If I really want to use water, I just put an aluminum drip tray on the lowest grate and then have two cooking grates above to use. Since I usually only use all three grates for chicken or ribs or hot/fast cooking, a water tray plus two use-able grates works for fine for me. And the access and clean up of a disposable tray is much easier than dealing with a pan that has to be foiled or scrubbed.
Second, the diameter dimension of the CJ brackets are ever so slightly different from the stock brackets. The stock water pan fits in perfectly, but other things may not. For example, I use a FireDial (which being flat solves the space problem) instead of the stock water pan. Turns out that the FireDial (which drops right into the regular brackets) is about 1/4 inch too big to slide into the CJ brackets. Same thing happened with the charcoal unit. I like to put the charcoal unit up on the water pan bracket to use the WSM as a grill.
[BTW, one of the nice things the CJ brackets do is make the grilling set-up really nice. Charcoal unit goes on the lowest bracket. Put the cooking grate on the top bracket for low heat, and then down to the middle bracket for high heat/searing.]
The solution is to just dremel down two of the CJ brackets to create the fraction of an inch of space that you need. No big deal, but highly annoying!!! Since the point of my buying the more expensive CJ brackets was to avoid the DIY McGyver. Hard to understand why CJ would make their brackets slightly smaller. Especially since they know that their longer brackets would make the well known tight space problem of the 18's lower part even worse. So it is pretty obvious that someone using the CJ brackets on an 18 is probably going to need to use a pan/diffuser alternative to the Weber stock pan.
I don't know the extent to which these spacing/pan issues would apply to the 22 or are just limited to the 18.