I'm going back to square one. My dino rib cook was a swirling mess.
First mistake was to start too big a fire and I never really got control after that, chasing temps up and down over and over.
Not to worry, the ribs came out pretty good, I just had to paddle upstream the get them there.
All I really know is this seems (so far) to be a pick a spot to place the meat and cook in it, and only in that spot because on either side of the sweet spot it's too hot or too cold.
To make matters worse, as the fire matures and wanes the sweet spot changes so the meat needs to be shuffled around to stay in the desired temp range.
I even broke down the set up mid cook, removing the meat and all 8 probes, to change the position of the deflector, which by the way did nothing meaningful, but it did give me a chance to try out my new long gloves.
Anyway I've decided to flip the charcoal grate and drill holes in it.
Perhaps someday I'll get to the fire bricks but it would seem to me that adding them will increase the heat getting into the cook chamber, which might be a good idea on it's own but won't help getting more even cook chamber temps.
And on that subject, I'm thinking adding the bricks will allow a smaller fire to deliver the same amount of heat to the cook chamber that a larger fire would deliver and thereby save valuable post oak mini-splits.