Junkyard Ingenuity

Weather, and heat are the bane of the barbeque's existence.  Yes, I am whining....

The Air Valve Plate on my barbeque rusted out, and became unusable.  The barbeque is broke, can't make Porx...  Red Alert!  Gotta get this fixed, but I don't want to spend any money doing it.  Well I do have some scrap sheet metal, and plenty of screws.  So I scratched a pattern on the sheet metal and cut it out with a tin snips.

The Air Valve Plate is also part of the structure between the main box, and the fire box on the side.  So I needed to support the fire box while I replaced the Air Valve Plate.  The bolts that hold the main box, and the fire box together are tempered to the point that bolts are fused to the nuts.  This is because the fire is always right next to the Air Valve Plate, whether it is in the main box or in the fire box.

So, here we are using a rusty old piece of metal to fix another rusty old piece of metal.  There are 6 bolts that attach the main box to the fire box, and also hold the Air Valve Plate.  The Air Valve Plate regulates air flow into the barbeque so that you can control the temperature.  With the old rusted out Air Valve Plate the temperature in the main box would swing up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, not good for smoking Porx.

Looking at the plate from the fire box side you can see the pivot hole for the damper, and the air feed holes.  Then I added an adjustable damper plate to be able to adjust the air flow into the main box.

This works better, and I am able to regulate the temperature down to about 335 degrees Fahrenheit.  Its still not low enough to do slow smoking.  In order to cook something like Brisket, or Porx Butts, I need to get the temperature down to around 225 degrees Fahrenheit.