Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation BBQ Pit...SOS

We are doing cookouts at the club this summer and I was thinking of doing some pulled pork. Here is what I have to work with. Any ideas on converting this thing into a pit BBQ...? Any thoughts greatly appreciated...!

Looks like a nice cement slab to park your smoker. I suppose you could jury rig up something but draft control is essential to controling your temperature. I cook on a similar grill set up every week for 150 people and it's a challenge. Scorching on the bottom and cold on the top. The heat curve for charcoal is very sharp and drops off quickly.

The open side of your grill looks like it would be a good place to put a fabricated smoker...store your hickory underneath. Good luck!

This is what I would do..

Was thinkin' that might be a possibility...

OK, nobody else respond, apparently we already have the solution...

I charge $100 per hour for my design fees.

So, that'll be 10 cents please.

ROFLMAO....that's just TFF!! Your best work yet!


I'll type up some ideas when I have more time but this would be my approach.

Now, why would you encourage him...?

You owe me a keyboard Dave!! TFF!!

Mike

Yeah, you can do it. If possible remove the solid iron sheet and replace with exanded metal. If you can't do that then just put your coals on the sheet and lay a piece of expanded metal on top of the pit. Put enough braces of something like a steel fence post under the expanded to hold your meat.

Take a sheet of galvanized iron and block the open end of your pit. Cut a door in it that you can cover so you can regulate draft. Take a couple of those concrete blocks and block off the closed end of your pit up to where the expanded metal is.

Go to a furniture or appliance store and get a cardboard box like a refridgerator or washing machine comes in.
Cut it so it fits flat over your meat. This is your lid. It won't catch fire because you are not going to be cooking that hot.

With a little work you can turn out some fine smoked pork on that set up.

BCR

BCR - Thanks for the observations and suggestions. Gotta mull that over. I keep thinking I would like to talk to the guy who built this to see what the plan was. Either he was a genius and had some unique/inspired way of doing things, or he just went wild with the bricks and concrete hoping for a miracle.

Here's northern dave the other day, caught the BBQ jones leavin the market and couldn't wait to get home...

You can use what you have right there. All that's missing are cooking gates and a cover, which are easy enough to ad-hoc. That rusted piece of steel likely slides in-and-out. That often provides great indirect heat as well as warming.

Honestly, I would not invest anything other than heat and meat! Just treat it like a big hole in the ground.

Aint me, I dont wear shades.

Plus it looks like that guy has a small tire fire going in that cooker. I use charcoal and oak, no tires.

This however actually is is me with one of the cookers I built.









I do know a thing or 2 on the subject.

And I still stand behind this design idea.

only thing better would be tucking fridge girl into a wet Camp Chickenbuck T-shirt.

If yanno wut I mean.

Fixed!

Either way better than "shaving the carrot" as someone else said.

You need 220 to 250 degrees of heat.... and smoke. You could cover the big grill with heavy duty tin foil and put your butts there. If you could shimmy the metal out 6", you could do it. You'd have to seal off the pork butt chamber. Wide roll tin foil stapled to furring strip frame. Cut a little hole in the top of the foil opposite the 6" slit. Do it right, and you could lift it to rearrange butts and baste. You could start coals in another place and toss a shovel at a time under the metal. You would get the heat to the butts and the smoke would come up through the slit and roll over the butts. An instant read stuck through the foil to keep track of the temp, and a remote in a butt, and you'd have it. It would give you the opportunity to tend a bbq pit for a good 12 to 16 hours. You get friends to watch for a few hours each and it's easier. Just don't let them get ahead with the heat. Whenever I'm doing a bbq, people always offer to watch the fire so I can sleep. Whenever I take them up on it, I always wake up to a fire that is too hot!


Or

You could do Miss Linn's May Recipe pork butts in the oven and fake it.

Hey Dave, you got that in a CAD file? Looks like a project for my buddy that has a metal shop. Put his shear and brake to use for me.

Someone get a rope...

Course I have six racks of ribs over lump and hickory right now at 225. They'll go up to Jorge's camp this weekend and feed a bunch so I might be a little prejudicious.