Alternative to the mailbox mod

[fuzzyfishin]

 After all the problems with my mes40. Finaly geting time to do a smoke. I purchased a pid and ssr. Wired the smoker and now have it running. I  purchased a pellet smoker a mav 732 and some pellets from Todd.

   Last Fri. I pulled out #14 of veni for jerky. Sat. morning before work had to get meat marinating. Sunday came and had plenty to do. Skewered the meat and let hang (to rid it of marinade). Had to decide how I was to use the a-maze-n. Thought of the mailbox mod, but didn't have one and no-one in town had any for sale. Was going to just set it in the smoker as many do. Then came this idea of using my smokey joe grill. So finaly after convincing the wife that we needed a new one, off we went. After leaving the liquor store (wife needed a relaxer do to my brainstorm), we purchased the new grill, which now allowed me to cut holes in the old one. I also picked up 2 alum. 90o elbows.

   Time to get to work. I cut a 3in. hole on top of the cover on the adjacent side of the vent. Placed one of the elbows in this hole and the other in the smoker (chip reciever). I lit the pellet amnps and set in the grill for a test run, that went well. Then raised the smoker  to connect the elbows. Put the meat in set the smoker to 100o lit the amnps again adding more pellets and now off and running. Wasn't to long and I had that charished thin blue rolling out the vent on top of the smoker. Let it go for 3hrs then started to raise the temp to 160o. I also lit the other end of the amnps for more smoke. Started the smoke at noon and pulled meat off at 9pm. All turned out great. Glad I had the idea of the amnps and mav732 (thanks to all that posted it). I can say the amnps is much better than the smoker kit I have from masterbuilt.

   Thank you to Todd for a great product. To all that posted about the amnps,732,pid and ssr. Even to the mailbox mod that had me come up with the idea of the grill at the last moment. The grill worked great.  I didn't use full venting of the grill. Bonus is that I can still use this grill for simple grilling yet. I just need to cover the 3in. hole.e

       New smokey joe                                                          Old smokey with the 3in. hole  

             amnps in grill                                                         grill attached to smoker with amnps

                hole set up                                                            roughly wired pid -ssr



     finished product                                                                                                                                                                    

 

[fixer]

Couldn't you have used the top vent to connect your pipe, since air intake could come in thru the bottom vent?

 

[JckDanls 07]

great idea... glad it worked out.... now you can build a mini WSM with the new Joe... what's nice is you don't have to do any mods to the Joe, it will still work as a grill just as you intended...

here's my build... http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/t/124570/my-version-of-the-mini-wsm

 

[daveomak]

Great mod...... nice job.....    

Dave

 

[fuzzyfishin]

 Thanks for the replys.

 Fixer: I wanted to keep that vent usable incase I neede more air flow into the grill for the amnps to work. It also alows me to use it as normal after closing up the hole I cut in.

 JD07: I had a smoker just like that. I gave it to a friend who was just getting into smoking. this smoke worked great and looking forward to using the electric.

Dave: Thanks, worked great for the first run.