<chuckle> I'm with @Chromeski on his one.
Granted I have not been privy to a full on inspection of the pits (not for want of asking) but best I can tell the fire is the source of heat and smoke. You are correct though as there are other places in town even that cook directly over the coals. But their burn areas are not connected to the pits at all. I have considered doing just a traditional vertical smoker design but feel the build and maintenance on that would be more complicated in terms of having to include a drip pan, water pan, clean out door, dampers and so on. In terms of size I am limited to about a 2x4x2 fire pit area so based on Feldons I was going to do a 2x4x6 chamber. Though factoring in the chimney height I may down size the pit so as to shorten the chamber. I am not sure Feldons still applies though given I will have an open pit.Dirtytires wrote: ↑April 10th, 2019, 9:24 pmI’ve never seen one in operation so please correct me if I’m wrong. I was under the impression that the small fire on the floor was just maintained to keep new coals ready to be added to the bottom of the block in ‘smokehouse.’ The coals create different heat zones and the meat needs to be moved around pretty frequently.
How big are you thinking? If my above assumption is correct, you would always need a fairly large surface area with hot coals in order to maintain heat zones. It seems this would make it less than ideal to fire up for a few racks of ribs for the family.
Interested to know more about your build ideas. Not sure this has come up here before so we can all learn a bit ourselves as we follow you thru the project.