Think it is 65 " if I remember right. It was a 250 gallon tank I cut one end off and added a ring that was 9 1/2" wide to it so I could maximize the cooking space and use the strip of left over steel.Coma, how wide is that door?
If you are looking at the single door design you need to take into consideration your rack design within the smoker. If you are intending on full length slide out racks for easy loading then you automatically need doors slightly wider than your cooking surface. From experence with a top rack that pulls out and a lower rack that does not, a slide out rack is almost a must unless you truly enjoy wearing your BBQ creations on your shoulders and sleeves. Being able to pull that whole rack out and correctly place your meat cuts is a definite bonus. As for the heat loss, just target ~50 degrees above your intended cook temp before you ever open the door to load your cooker. You will have plenty of time to pull out the sliding rack, toss in the meat and seal everthing back up tight. Your Cook Chamber will also be ready to handle the heat sinks (cold hunks of meat) you just tossed in and will probable stabilize right at your intended cooking temp a whole lot faster than you expected. Since I seldom open my smoker doors more than one every other hour and even then it is for a short period of time, heat loss is minimal as the body of the smoker is fairly residual to the cooking temp.Fiveflat wrote:How big of a door do you need for a whole pig? I've never done a whole one.
Practice makes perfect!The worlds best smoker is always the one I'm going to build next….
My mama says I wuz perfect when I came intos this world ... I just likes ta practicecoma44 wrote:Practice makes perfect!