Project: Smoke-Stacked - Part 1

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, I'm back in the blog world.  Sorry for the long absence, but I'm back.  Hopefully, for good this time.  I won't bore you with excuses or anything, so let's cut to the chase.  Project: Smoke-Stacked is underway.  I am building a double barrel smoker, out of 55-gallon drums.  One reason for this project is simple... I love barbeque.  Another contributing factor, is that there are no longer any barbeque restaurants in Gardner.  Ironic, since we are still considered part of the Kansas City suburbs.  With this in mind, I am taking it upon myself to build a big enough smoker, that our friends, family, and neighbors can enjoy with us.  For a sneak peak at what I'm trying to build, head HERE.  I was so impressed when I stumbled upon this guy's smoker build one day.  I'm basing my design on his smoker. 
Less talk, more rock... let's get down to business with some pictures of my progress. First off, I  had to acquire three, 55-gallon steel drums. This is probably common sense, but be sure your drums did not carry any harmful or toxic materials in them.  One will be used as the cooking barrel (top barrel), while the other will be used only to cut a door for the cooking chamber.  (More on that later.)  The third will be used to burn the wood (bottom barrel). Here is a picture of two of the barrels while I was attempting to burn out the remaining petroleum oil that the barrels originally had in them. 

I think my fire was not nearly strong enough, as I still had quite a bit of cleaning out to do with the inside of the barrels.  In hindsight I wish I would have cleaned them out with soap and water first, and then burn them out to remove any remaining material.  Oh well.
After getting all the barrels, I ordered some of my necessary hardware.  Vogelzang makes stove conversion kits for 55 gallon drums.  A few tweaks in the design, and you can instantly have a nice smoker!  Here was the night it arrived on our doorstep. 

 I'm still missing one collar for the exhaust stove pipe, but hopefully that will be here before I'm ready for it.  After burning out the barrels, and making sure I had all my parts, I began the long process of paint removal.  Before you do any sort of work, where you are grinding off paint, safety needs to come first.  So, before I started, I made sure to have my hearing protection, eye protection, and a respirator.  Here, you can clearly see, I am ready to roll!

It took a couple of hours with an angle grinder, and a lot of ibuprofen, but I finally got the barrels down to the metal.

Be sure to wear clothes you don't care about, because that paint will get EVERYWHERE!  Here are the barrels I am going to use for the cooking barrel, and the donor barrel for the main door. I couldn't decide exactly which one I wanted to use for what, so I went ahead and stripped them both.

They are so cool looking, it will be a shame when I go to paint them.  After grinding the paint off of my third barrel, I was ready to start cutting out holes for the stove hardware.  Here is a shot of the hole being cutout of the bottom barrel, where the stove door will go.

Basically, I just sat the stove door right where I wanted it to be mounted, and traced the inside with a marker, and cut it out with my jigsaw.  Here's a picture of how it will look when I eventually mount the door.

Thank goodness it was a beautiful weekend, I was able to make some decent progress on this project.  That's all I've got for now, but check back for further updates.  My goal is to have this completed by the end of the February, but we'll see.  I'm anxious to get out there and start smoking some meat!