After reading Aaron Franklin's book I really wanted to add a new smoker to my collection and get a real wood burning cooker. Offset smokers are a Texas thing. Oak smoked meat, low and slow is a completely different process than the pellet and propane smokers I already had. I knew I was going to have a learning curve with this style of smoking and I really didn't want to spend the $1,000 on a good quality smoker until I knew how to handle it. So I started searching the internet for a cheap used one that I might be able to restore or modify to get some practice smoking with an offset.
If found this old Brinkman on LetGo for $50.
Anything that used to be wooden on it was rotted off and there was a decent amount of surface rust, but other than that, it was solid. We hauled it home where it sat in my backyard for 3 months before I got the courage and had the time to start refurbishing it.
Removing the hardware.
Anything that had a screw on it was removed; brackets for the shelf, the handles and the flap on the fire box. Then it was time to grind down all of that rust.
Here's what I used to get all of that sludge and rust off:
Cordless Drill
Aluminum Oxide Grinding Wheel (similar to this one)
Respirator
Safety Glasses
Muscles I didn't know I had
I spent a solid weekend doing nothing but grinding down both the inside and outside of the Brinkman. It was dirty work but I managed to get all of the rust off. Here's some pictures of the progress where you can see the bare metal next to the rust. The fire box was the most challenging as that rust was pretty thick.
After this I was ready for a facial and a fresh manicure.
Now time to paint!
Using this Rust Oleum high temperature grill paint, I did two light coats letting the first coat dry for 24 hours before applying the second. Then I followed up with a 3rd coat for spots and sprayed all of the hardware I had removed earlier.
I'm not much of a woodworker so I asked my husband to cut some pieces of wood to replace the shelf and the wooden handles. I also bought a new temperature gauge. I couldn't find a Brinkman gauge but the Oklahoma Joe gauge in the pictures below fit perfectly. I did buy a cover for it so hopefully I can stave off rust in the future.
Reassembly
I had to replace a few of the screws that were completely rusted and were removed with a saw. It came back together pretty easily and then out to the backyard! I worked coated the inside with vegetable oil and got the hottest fire I could going in the fire box to season it up and burn off anything nasty. At the very end of seasoning I threw on a few boneless chicken thighs for a quick grill.
There was nothing complicated about refurbishing the smoker. It was just a lot of hard work and time. I'm excited to start learning how to cook on the offset! I couldn't be happier with the results.
See below for a video tour of the updated $50 smoker!
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