Generating smoke in my char broil

[gfunky]

I have a dilemma on my hands.

I've had a char broil electric vertical box smoker for about a year and a half now. Over this span of time i feel like I've tried everything under the sun to get the wood chips or wood chunks I'm using for smoking to actually get hot enough to generate smoke.

I've tried using charcoal briquettes but that was a flop because there isn't any air flow thru the smoker.

I've tried letting the smoker get up to about 400 degrees for roughly 30 mins to get the smoke box good and hot and the chips smoking only to have it completely stop smoking within 45 mins of turning it down to temp.

This afternoon, after fooling with the thing for an hr and thinking it was set up to go I returned from errands to find my pork shoulders pretty much just sat in an outdoor oven the last 3 hrs.

I was pretty annoyed so I just dumped the chips and chunks right on the heating element. That did the trick and that thing started smoking like never before. so my question is - is that bad practice? Am I going to ruin my smoker or heating element if I chose to do this In the future?

 

[old sarge]

Bad idea. Although contained you could conceivably start a fire. Maybe you it would not last long because of a lack of air but a fire would ruin the meat. I would get a better smoker. One with a great track record of reliability.

 

[bbqwillie]

Does it have the chip tray stuck in the back left corner of the CC? If not, post a picture of the CC with the chip tray in place.