Egor

[Puff]

Gizmo,

Thanks for this cerebral post... My head is starting to hurt but I can say this.... In my limited cooking experience with smoking, I have had my 275 tank running 4 times now complete for up to 9 hours. The last two fires were logs only. I used MANY splits to keep it up to temp for so many hours that it was nearly criminal NOT to have some meat in there. However all in all a great experience and provided me with a sort of instruction manual for that specific smoker.

I have thought of the exact same heat sink griddle on top of the FB. I sure the conduction of heat alone would provide excellent cooking and even if you dont use it, you're extracting a quantity of heat. A used top should be easy to come by.

I am trying to come up with an idea but yours just seems so perfect. My next smoker needs to be REALLY patio sized and only moved around the deck. Have you ever really experiments with temps and fires in your mini-mini smoker? The comments you make above about a smaller fire clearly apply there but you'd need to feed it every 10 minutes
By the way, I should name this new smoker Roge(r)......Thats Egor spelled backwards ;)

[Gizmo]

Thanks for the kind words Puff.

My 2 smallest RF's were Earl and Bar-B - I didn't keep either one so I can't speak from personal experience. I don't think Bar-B has been lit since I sent it home to Smokerbuilder HQ last year - it was really just intended to be a trophy anyway.

Earl is still cooking and the fellow that got him swears by him - I'll have to ask him roughly how he feeds/adjusts him during a cook and I'll let you know.