Hi guys,
OK, I went ahead and made the drill hole modification to the bottom of my ST as described by Pcallison, TJohnson, and Scarbelly (RIP). My rationale was that as long as the additional holes could be covered back up (as described by Pcallison), then if the modification didn't work I would just cover them back up. No harm, no foul.
Here is the bottom of my ST. I neglected to take a "before" picture, so the picture is the "after" picture with the red markups showing what it looked like before. I made no other modifications to the ST. Because I am a wimp and a sissie, I had a local machine shop do the drilling for me. I bought the step bit, and then gave them the bit in return for drilling the holes.
I covered the bottom of the ST with aluminum foil and then punched out holes in the aluminum foil over about 1 and 1/2 of the holes, approximately doubling the area I had for airflow over what the ST would normally have. I then just cold-smoked some cheese using the AMNS to make sure I was still getting nice looking smoke with the extra airflow. I had to put the AMNS on a rack above the element housing, as the 6x6 AMNS doesn't fit on the bottom of the smoker. Here is my cheese getting cold-smoked.
Cold-smoking looked good. So then I tested the unit with the element turned on, but still using the AMNS for smoke-generation (so leaving the ST wood box empty). Temp control of the ST was less accurate with a much bigger temperature overshoot with the 2 heat sources running. Not too surprising, I guess.
Here is what the smoke looked like when using the AMNS + ST heating element when the chamber temperatures was around 230 deg F.
What I found is that if you place the AMNS on the rack directly above the ST wood box (and both the wood box and the rack had aluminum foil over them), that the AMNS will still work just fine for TBS smoke generation without the smoke "jumping rows" even up to a temp of 240 degrees or so. However, when the temp inside the smoker got above 240 degress, the smoke changed from a blue color to a gray color, and was pumping out much faster than it did at lower temperatures. I tried to get a picture of this, but with the evening light I couldn't capture the smoke in a picture.
So! Tomorrow I'm going to smoke a pork butt using the "foil pan/smoke to 165 deg IT/cover with aluminum foil to 200 deg IT" approach laid out by Jeff Philips. My plan is to use the AMNS for smoke generation, and set the ST controller to try and keep an average chamber temp of around 200 deg F. Worst case scenario, I'll just apply smoke using the AMNS for 2-3 hours, then cover the butt with foil, remove the AMNS from the chamber, and then crank the heat up to 250 deg F until done.
How wrong do you think I can go with this approach?? Can't be any worse than my spare ribs.
I'll post tomorrow to let you guys know!
Thanks!
Clarissa
P.S.- I still need to try just using wood chunks or chips in the ST woodbox for smoke generation with the extra drill holes for more airflow. For right now, I've had better success creating tasty smoke using the AMNS. So far, all of my attempts to use the ST for smoke generation have resulted in creosote flavor and my husband looking at me like he can't quite remember why he had wanted to marry me. I'll play around with the airflow using the ST woodbox to try and dial in the smoke when I have some more time.