Doug Selman
TVWBB Super Fan
Hi guys, a few months back, I offered to our long time good friends wife to build a Mini for her husbands Bday. I used a Vasconia pot for the first 2 I've built, but of course couldn't find one this time around. I found a generic 32qt pot at a Hispanic grocery store nearby for $21 and took a chance on it. The bottom of the pot fit fine on the Smokey Joe bottom, but I had to crimp the rim of the pot for the lid to fit. I cut the bottom of the pot out leaving four tabs 1 1/2" x 1 3/4" around the inside to bend the ends and then bend them up to support a 12" aluminum pie pan for a heat diffuser.


The pie pan rim fit perfect on the tabs just below the lower cooking grate on the steamer plate lip. I used 1/4"x 1/2" ss bolts for the top grate about 4 1/2" down
from the top rim of the pot, which gave about 6" of clearance between the 2 cooking grates, and the lid.


I used vinyl decals as reverse stencils for the designs for painting.


After the paint dried 24hrs I carefully peeled the decals off, leaving the original aluminum as the design. After the 7 day dry period, put it all back together
with the thermometer just under the top cook grate. I like to personalize these and used his intitials, DB, which gave me the idea for the front decal that I ordered from here. The back Eagle I got from a desktop wallpaper I downloaded as a jpeg and cut on our neighbors Silhouette machine.


The finished Mini


Dan was pretty surprised and happy when we gave it to him!
Thanks for lookin


The pie pan rim fit perfect on the tabs just below the lower cooking grate on the steamer plate lip. I used 1/4"x 1/2" ss bolts for the top grate about 4 1/2" down
from the top rim of the pot, which gave about 6" of clearance between the 2 cooking grates, and the lid.


I used vinyl decals as reverse stencils for the designs for painting.


After the paint dried 24hrs I carefully peeled the decals off, leaving the original aluminum as the design. After the 7 day dry period, put it all back together
with the thermometer just under the top cook grate. I like to personalize these and used his intitials, DB, which gave me the idea for the front decal that I ordered from here. The back Eagle I got from a desktop wallpaper I downloaded as a jpeg and cut on our neighbors Silhouette machine.


The finished Mini


Dan was pretty surprised and happy when we gave it to him!
Thanks for lookin
Last edited: