Blather

Here's the finished product. At the bottom is the re-worked BuckStove fireplace insert. On top is the gutted Dacor oven. At the top right is the former Dacor blower box converted to a firebox and now a secondary smoker. The trash can on the right contains fruitwood for smoking.












A few blog posts below, I put up some pix of the smoker my big son and I built from our Fancy-schmanzy Dacor stove that died. (The replacement is a plain-vanilla Magic Chef, but that's another rant.)

My big son wasn't happy with the firebox I devised. It worked, but not as well as he'd like. So he went to craigslist and found a free fireplace insert that someone in Oakland was trying to give away. We drove out to the house, brought it home and then we began to fix it up. The sheet-metal flanges that framed the Buck Stove insert got unscrewed and set aside. He put the doors in some Simple Green while I worked on converting the fireplace insert into a smoker firebox.


Here's the product of our test run: two nice, smoky pork roasts. My big son is getting the hang of keeping the fire going and maintaining an oven temp of 220-240 degrees.










The Buck Stove had some good features- the firebox was lined with cast firebrick; the top was 1/4" steel plate, the three layers of stove were 1/8" steel; the doors had a good seal; the whole thing was designed to hold a fire, enough to heat a house, so keeping a small, smokey fire wouldn't tax it at all.

I measured everything, then we took a ride to Alco in San Leandro. We got some industrial-strength wheels, one of which would carry more weight than the whole thing weighs. And we got some rectangular tubing, about ten inches internal area. (The old smoker box was plumbed with four-inch flex aluminum tubing, about ten square inches there, too.) My son, who hadn't welded in ten years, laid two pieces of this tubing together and ran some very nice welds along them, making twenty square inches of flue.

I fabbed a plate so the two welded tubes would sit in the stove flue and stick up about six inches. We drilled and screwed the plate-and-tube assembly to the top of the stove.

The next step was tricky, but it worked out very well. We lifted the old Dacor oven and laid it on top of the plate assembly. I traced the outline with a marker. Then we flipped the oven over; my son suggested I drill the corners first. I used my skilsaw with a metal-cutting blade to plunge-cut the long sides and my air-powered rotary cutter to cut the short ends. When we set the oven over the plate, everything fit perfectly the first time! Woo hooo!!




Here's my big son checking the progress of those roasts.

This is the result of him getting the smoking bug from watching Alton Brown.








I was a big disappointed that the firebox I'd worked on so long was going to be discarded. But my big son thought he could use the same box and flex aluminum tubing to make a secondary, lukewarm cooler; that's what he did.

Father's Day dinner was pork with baked beans, coleslaw, corn on the cob and lemonade. Happily, my daughter brought my small son and we all ate a terrific meal.

Just before dinner, my small son and I fabbed a tool for the smoker- a sort of S-shaped piece of steel on a piece of cherry tree for a handle. Now there's a good push-pull gizmo for my son to use on the oven racks.