Sunday, June 01, 2008
Rusty, dusty, crusty and smoky
This involves a dusty home-improvement project, a defective high-zoot appliance and a television show's nudge.
A couple of decades ago, I built a microwave cart for our condo's kitchen. When we moved here, I brought the cart, but because the kitchen had a different place for the microwave, I've been using the microwave cart to hold barbecue tools out on the deck, not the best use of this sturdy piece of kitchen furniture.
The fancy-schmancy Dacor "restaurant" stove that came with the house kept dying. Richie rebuilt the burners, replaced the oven heating element, and still that stove kept failing us. A few weeks ago, we were down to two burners and broil only when we got a no-frills basic-white Magic Chef, the Ford Pinto of stoves. The Dacor was on its way to a $50 grave at the local waste management.
My big son the Mechanical Engineer and certified genius likes to cook. He watches Alton Brown and got me to watching this guy's antics. AB is great because he gets me grinning with parodies and humor, all the while teaching me stuff I never knew I was interested in, like why the butt part is lower on the animal than the shoulder, yadda yadda.
One of AB's projects involved a smoker. In a pastiche of Junkyard Wars and that goofy cooking challenge show, Iron Chef, AB's challenge was to MacGyver-cobble a smoker out of a couple of wall lockers, cardboard boxes, an iron, yadda yadda. Amid chuckles at sophisticated humor, I learned how to make your own bacon and how to cook in a smoker.
Well, we love bacon, and my son is a really good cook, so we decided to try our Junkyard Wars hand at assembling a smoker. Could we have gone to the store and gotten one? Sure, but both Richie and I are both ecological enough and cheap enough that making one seemed like a good thing. OK, he's frugal; I'm penurious.
On the left is a shot of the back of the stove. There was a hole in the box where the light bulb uas. This is what we used to duct the hot smoke in.
This is the microwave cart on the right. I've removed one structural element that once held a shelf at chin height.
Brainstorming, we decided to re-use the old Dacor stove. The oven was an enameled steel box designed to withstand temperatures of 450+ degrees and came with stainless steel racks, just the ideal environment for making your own bacon, beef jerky, etc. After we disassembled the burner section from the oven section, we were stumped: what to use for a firebox? Alton brown used half of a wall locker with an iron in the bottom. I dug out this old 30-gallon steel drum. Good, but it would need some modification to use it as a pedestal, and then we might have the issue of tip-over-ness. (Yeah, that's not a word, but you get my drift.)
This is the oven box on its side. The mechanism on the right is the door closing latch. Latching the door shut is a good thing- it helps keep the heat in.
On the right is the steel box holding the blower motor and which supported the entire stove off the floor.
However, my son pointed out that the microwave cart might make a suitable frame for the smoker. And he was right. I cut a couple of pieces of bed frame to fit and put them on the inside. The oven fit perfectly.
On the left is the back of the firebox. Note the recycled dryer ducting coming out of the box and the nice aluminum flex tubing.
On the right is the firebox opened up. The holes are from a part of a recycled barbecue.
All that was left was a firebox. Again we considered the steel drum. Then an old tool box, but Richie was loathe to destroy something useful and iconic, like a tool box. We even considered sawing a helium can in half. We looked at an old ammo can, but while the metal was sturdy, the volume wasn't enough to sustain much of a fire.
The old Dacor had a rather large blower underneath. The box holding the blower was also the main support for the entire stove, so I thought, "Why not use the support, too?" The box had a few holes associated with air coming in and going out, but it was still sturdy and fairly large. So I covered up the rectangular holes and made one new one, for the $8 flexible aluminum tubing going from the firebox to the smoking chamber. We recycled an old rusted-out barbecue for the sliding air dampers and a couple of four-inch clothes dryer ducting adapters.
Here are the main components- the cart, the oven that'll be the smoke chamber and the blower box that will be the firebox.
On the right is my son's thermometer, stuck in the hole that Dacor used for the thermocouple. Just above is the ceramic stack that was the standard heat vent for the oven.
Here's my gravity-powered latch for the firebox door. That's a small bolt welded to the back piece of steel. A hole in that bar stock makes it swivel. A larger bolt welded to the end is the weight that makes it rotate to vertical, effecting the latching action.
I think we're about $10 into this smoker. We fired up some charcoal this evening to see how it works. The firebox has a few leaks and I need to fab a latch of some sort to keep the door closed. But my son put a thermometer into the hole in the oven where the Dacor folks had routed a thermocouple, and found we could achieve 220 degrees with a medium fire; with a low fire, 165 was quite possible.
Now we've got to find a butcher shop that will sell us pork bellies so we can make our own bacon. And maybe we can find a meat grinder and some casings so we can make our own sausages. With a bit of practice, we might cook a couple of chickens or even a turkey in this smoker.
Richie's asked me if I'll name this smoker. And I might. Anthropomorphism demands a name for this guy.
Post script: The steel burner units included a quasi-barbecue one that I will modify into a small, portable charcoal grill for my trailer. I've got a good steel box and a good-quality stainless-steel grate. That'll be another post, one day.
A couple of decades ago, I built a microwave cart for our condo's kitchen. When we moved here, I brought the cart, but because the kitchen had a different place for the microwave, I've been using the microwave cart to hold barbecue tools out on the deck, not the best use of this sturdy piece of kitchen furniture.
The fancy-schmancy Dacor "restaurant" stove that came with the house kept dying. Richie rebuilt the burners, replaced the oven heating element, and still that stove kept failing us. A few weeks ago, we were down to two burners and broil only when we got a no-frills basic-white Magic Chef, the Ford Pinto of stoves. The Dacor was on its way to a $50 grave at the local waste management.
My big son the Mechanical Engineer and certified genius likes to cook. He watches Alton Brown and got me to watching this guy's antics. AB is great because he gets me grinning with parodies and humor, all the while teaching me stuff I never knew I was interested in, like why the butt part is lower on the animal than the shoulder, yadda yadda.
One of AB's projects involved a smoker. In a pastiche of Junkyard Wars and that goofy cooking challenge show, Iron Chef, AB's challenge was to MacGyver-cobble a smoker out of a couple of wall lockers, cardboard boxes, an iron, yadda yadda. Amid chuckles at sophisticated humor, I learned how to make your own bacon and how to cook in a smoker.
Well, we love bacon, and my son is a really good cook, so we decided to try our Junkyard Wars hand at assembling a smoker. Could we have gone to the store and gotten one? Sure, but both Richie and I are both ecological enough and cheap enough that making one seemed like a good thing. OK, he's frugal; I'm penurious.
On the left is a shot of the back of the stove. There was a hole in the box where the light bulb uas. This is what we used to duct the hot smoke in. This is the microwave cart on the right. I've removed one structural element that once held a shelf at chin height.
Brainstorming, we decided to re-use the old Dacor stove. The oven was an enameled steel box designed to withstand temperatures of 450+ degrees and came with stainless steel racks, just the ideal environment for making your own bacon, beef jerky, etc. After we disassembled the burner section from the oven section, we were stumped: what to use for a firebox? Alton brown used half of a wall locker with an iron in the bottom. I dug out this old 30-gallon steel drum. Good, but it would need some modification to use it as a pedestal, and then we might have the issue of tip-over-ness. (Yeah, that's not a word, but you get my drift.)
This is the oven box on its side. The mechanism on the right is the door closing latch. Latching the door shut is a good thing- it helps keep the heat in.
On the right is the steel box holding the blower motor and which supported the entire stove off the floor. However, my son pointed out that the microwave cart might make a suitable frame for the smoker. And he was right. I cut a couple of pieces of bed frame to fit and put them on the inside. The oven fit perfectly.
On the left is the back of the firebox. Note the recycled dryer ducting coming out of the box and the nice aluminum flex tubing.On the right is the firebox opened up. The holes are from a part of a recycled barbecue.
All that was left was a firebox. Again we considered the steel drum. Then an old tool box, but Richie was loathe to destroy something useful and iconic, like a tool box. We even considered sawing a helium can in half. We looked at an old ammo can, but while the metal was sturdy, the volume wasn't enough to sustain much of a fire.
The old Dacor had a rather large blower underneath. The box holding the blower was also the main support for the entire stove, so I thought, "Why not use the support, too?" The box had a few holes associated with air coming in and going out, but it was still sturdy and fairly large. So I covered up the rectangular holes and made one new one, for the $8 flexible aluminum tubing going from the firebox to the smoking chamber. We recycled an old rusted-out barbecue for the sliding air dampers and a couple of four-inch clothes dryer ducting adapters.
Here are the main components- the cart, the oven that'll be the smoke chamber and the blower box that will be the firebox.
On the right is my son's thermometer, stuck in the hole that Dacor used for the thermocouple. Just above is the ceramic stack that was the standard heat vent for the oven.
Here's my gravity-powered latch for the firebox door. That's a small bolt welded to the back piece of steel. A hole in that bar stock makes it swivel. A larger bolt welded to the end is the weight that makes it rotate to vertical, effecting the latching action.
I think we're about $10 into this smoker. We fired up some charcoal this evening to see how it works. The firebox has a few leaks and I need to fab a latch of some sort to keep the door closed. But my son put a thermometer into the hole in the oven where the Dacor folks had routed a thermocouple, and found we could achieve 220 degrees with a medium fire; with a low fire, 165 was quite possible.
Now we've got to find a butcher shop that will sell us pork bellies so we can make our own bacon. And maybe we can find a meat grinder and some casings so we can make our own sausages. With a bit of practice, we might cook a couple of chickens or even a turkey in this smoker.
Richie's asked me if I'll name this smoker. And I might. Anthropomorphism demands a name for this guy.
Post script: The steel burner units included a quasi-barbecue one that I will modify into a small, portable charcoal grill for my trailer. I've got a good steel box and a good-quality stainless-steel grate. That'll be another post, one day.
# posted by rich @ 5:37 PM 
