My first Mini - built and testing now!

[Aaron Morris]

First off, thanks to everyone in this forum for the ideas and examples. I bought a Smokey Joe Gold locally (my silver was 15 years old and too rusty to use). Took a while but I found a Barrington 32 quart steamer pot at a local Mexican Grocery for $28. The top had to be crimped, but unfortuantely it was the only thing I could find. Seems like everywhere online and local is out.

I built mine with stainless bolts/acorn nuts, used the tamale steamer insert for the deflector. I also built a charcoal basket. No temp gauge installed yet, but I found a weber WSM silicone probe grommet at the local hardware store. I was checking out the WSMs and the guy there asked what I was looking at, and I told him I was building one, and would love to find that grommet. He said they had an extra but weren't sure why, so sold it to me for $3. Score.

I've been side-lighting it with a torch. I've got two racks of ribs on the upper grate right now in a rib rack, seems to maintain the temps nicely!

Next I'll be hooking up my heatermeter blower/damper to make it more automated.



Ribs 1 hour in:


Graph of temps after light and stabilizing. Ribs went on at 13:15. The highlighted and section that's bigger is my current cook. The graph before was an overnight test, which shows a nice 250 degree temp hold over 4 hours (the first hour or so was hotter with no deflector)

 

[ChuckO]

Next I'll be hooking up my heatermeter blower/damper to make it more automated.

That's a sharp looking mini and soon to be high tech. Congrats, you'll love the lil beast, mine cooks a lot of meals, from jerky as low as 140 degrees to wings at 600+ degrees. Keep us updated on yours

 

[Tommy B]

good looking build!

 

[Aaron Morris]

So here she is with a Heatermeter controlling it, and a Rotodamper 3 Servo/Fan blower attached. The gold is sweet because a 3/4" pipe screws right into the side holes with no modifications. You can see I just just a 3/4" pipe nipple, and a 1" hole plug for the other hole:


After a day worth of tweaking and tuning the heatermeter for this small pit, I reloaded with with less than a half load of coals, and let the damper do the magic. Ran for about 4 hours until the fire went out. For those of you considering the heatermeter, my PID settings are B=0, P=5, I=.005,D=8. I'm running fan on at max only of 3%, and a startup fan max of 10%. I simply side light the coals through the pipe nipple with a torch for 2 minutes, and then blower does the rest and gets the pit stable at 250 in about 15-20 mins.


Thanks for the compliments. This has been fun for sure! The ribs I made turned out awesome. Now we're on to pulled pork this week. This is going to be my camping and just for fun smoker as I have a traeger for larger stuff (although the mini has more smoke flavor for sure).