dl8860

Awesome, enjoy it!

Worth mentioning too that I've seen it this price before, so it's possible it's only a temporary price drop.

Don't forget we have to pay for the meat too 😁

@Craig Price Kamado Joe classic 2 is £1,199 right now on amazon. Can even do 12 monthly payments of 99.95, that's interest free.

Very active topic! as one of my posts was quoted above regarding a similar choice, I'll just say that i went for the KJ 2 and have loved every minute using it. I agree with the sentiment that there's no bad choices, and it's a shame the price of the kj2 has never really come down apart from limited time sales. But i can count on one hand the number of times I've read someone say a bad thing about the kj2. It's class.

That is very stoic if you used it for 18 months without being able to hold a stable temperature! You'll find anything else a walk in the park after that hopefully. Enjoy the weber, hope you have some great cooks with it.

8 hours at a good cooking temp on one load of charcoal on your first fire on a small smoker is definitely a win!

Looks like a really well done mod, nice one. I have the non-smoker version of this https://landmann.com/uk/product/taurus-660-charcoal-barbecue/ Have used it with some success but my very amateur silicon beading effort (as messy as it sounds) is not in the same league as your aluminium and stove tape masterpiece! I've had it 3 or 4 years now, and I'm finding the lid is starting to rust on the inside. Otherwise the rest of it is in good nick really. Are you sat tending the fire constantly though? Looks like the logs are burning pretty fast there! Or does it slow right down once you close the lid? Last thing, would be worth saying that the oven cook bit should be done at similar or slightly higher temp than the smoker, the few times I've put it in the oven at 350F it has dried out, even if wrapped. Maybe you found different but I thought worth mentioning.

Looks like a great bit of kit, love the dual thermoms (even if aesthetic only, I see you have a couple of probes too) and the clasps look great too.

That is a very ugly thing of beauty! I think most firewood suppliers will be able to tell a hardwood from a soft, but most won't sell different types of wood individually. Or at least don't see the value in it. The few that do seem to be able to charge a huge premium selling as dedicated 'smoking wood', anywhere from 4-10 pounds for a kilo. That's more than some meat costs! So many general firewood suppliers will have cherry, maple, apple, beech and of course oak etc. and be selling it for 1/25th of the price above.

Yours sounds much more accurate than mine, sadly it's a fact of life that manufacturers (even biggers ones like weber) continue to ship BBQs with temp gauges that are miles off. Their only use is if you can sort of calibrate it against a good thermometer so you can roughly know the actual temp of the pit on cooks when you don't want to use a thermom probe. How are you liking the callow so far otherwise?

Good luck getting up and running. Be sure to post back if you have any other questions or just want to show off your results!

One thing I'd add, and this isn't gospel but my own experience, but I would barely call 270 an overshoot. For me, for almost anything that isn't a grill/sear etc., I aim for 250F. If it's anywhere in the range of 225-275 though, that's good enough for me and I find amongst all the other variables that we have to contend with, 20F each way is small change. So while it's good to have a target, don't worry about stable temps to the nth degree. It can change due to wind, sunshine, even the position of your ambient probe moving a little.

That lamb looks fantastic, keep at it!

I think mk3 is the latest. Honestly thinking about it I reckon you could just crack on without it. You have 4 bottom vents total, just close up the other 3 more than you otherwise would and you should be good. Maybe try a test run before you put anything on to cook, but on my mk1 I often need all 3 bottom vents fully open anyway to get to 250F. I know the airflow in later revisions is better, but I don't think it would be impossible to manage with one 'fully open' all the time.