Do you agree with this statement:

"A smoker, fed by a properly maintained and tended heat source, will maintain, within a reasonable tolerance, a uniform temperature across its available cooking surfaces"

I can't even begin to imagine how you're going to try and twist this into supporting your idea, but yes. Fire bricks placed into the smoker will get hot.

Do your fire bricks make your pork butt take longer to cook? By your argument, they should.

Are you under the impression heat is only transferred through convection in a smoker or is this only true in your particular smoker?

Well, considering that is by definition how a smoker works....

Radiant heat = direct cooking, aka grilling. Convection heat = indirect cooking, aka smoking. Convection heat = griddle (and to a small degree, the sear marks you get on a properly cooked steak). You want to use "the laws of physics" as your defense but don't understand how the three basic forms of heat transfer apply to cooking methods?

Why don't you go ahead and do your same experiment. I've already explained that I *have* done it from anywhere from 1 to almost two dozen butts, with negligible differences. You go ahead and prove me wrong.

You continue to ignore the basic truth: Thermal mass matters when the system is near equilibrium, i.e. heat in equals heat out with no waste. Smokers \never* operate in this state.*

Each cut of meat only "sees" the air around it. If that air temperature does not change, the cook rate does not change. If that air temperature DOES change....we add more heat to make sure that it does not change.

You have yet to explain with any degree of accuracy how adding a second cut of meat has any impact on the first if the temperature in the smoker is not allowed to change (which, we take measures to ensure it does not). Instead, you have tried to introduce fire dynamics where we have to account for all three methods of heat transfer, instead of the inside of a smoker where we are only dealing with convection.

It is not as complex as you are trying to make it.

And you reposted it expecting something different?

You know that's the definition of insanity, right?

To comment on the actual pics, since that's what YOU wanted:

I think it's tacky as hell in the first place, The paint layout isn't well planned, and then that poor plan is poorly executed.

This is on the level of a 5th grader bringing home 'artwork", and mom telling them it looks great andhanging it on the fridge. But only because she loves you and doesn't want to hurt your feelings by telling you it's absolute garbage.

If the paint job was even halfway decent, we could compliment on that. But it looks like exactly what it is. A rattle can job done by an amateur. You guys might be proud, but everyone at the range is laughing at you.

Just remember: You asked "what we thinking"

You're somehow simultaneously overly simplifying and complicating the question at hand.

Fire room conditions are an entirely different animal, with dynamics far beyond anything in the smoking meat realm - particularly as the contents of the smoker do not *add* to the heat of the system.

But at the same time, you are trying to treat a smoker as a perfectly balanced, static thermodynamic environment, where the heat source produces ONLY the heat needed to cook a single butt, and 100% of the generated heat is absorbed by the meat with no waste. In other words, if the pork butt can absorb 500 btu/hr, then that is all the heat source produces - and if you add a second butt, the heat demand increases but the heat supply does not change.

This ignores the fact that a smoker is a horribly unbalanced, dynamic environment. First, the heat supply is not static; we aim for a target chamber temperature and adjust airflow and fuel to maintain that temperature regardless of what happens in the chamber - if something, anything, causes the ambient temperature inside the chamber to drop, adjustments are made to the firebox to provide more heat and maintain that desired temperature. Secondly, at any given moment, heat is being produced well in excess of any rate the meat can absorb it, and is being 'wasted' out of the system through the vent/exhaust stack - if this waste was not occurring, the chamber would overshoot it's desired temperature, and we'd be cooking at 500 degrees instead of 225. The firebox environment dynamically changes to maintain a stable temperature - and in doing so, is *always* producing more heat than is actually needed - better to produce excess heat and waste it than not produce enough heat.

Now let's consider the meat itself. The thing that affects how fast a piece of meat inside a smoker cooks is the temperature of the air immediately around it - which we have established, is maintained at a set, controlled level by firebox management. Unless you have meat crammed onto the shelves with 1/4" between cuts, and racks on top of racks inhibiting airflow between cuts, barring any hot/cold spots in the smoker, each cut of meat is going to be exposed to the same 225 degree air as every other cut, and is going to cook at the same rate it would if it were the only piece of meat in the smoker.

And this is why I mentioned my old Bradley smoker earlier - if it, with it's measly 625 watts total heat capacity, could keep up and maintain chamber temperatures with all four racks full of food, any wood, gas, or pellet fueled cooker is going to have no difficulty at all with the task.

Weber kettle, weber genesis, masterbuilt gravity series, and blackstone. Want a pizza oven, but thinking I'll go with the attachment for the gravity series just because I've got enough standalone appliances as it is

13 year FF, captain on my department. And this argument is irrelevant.

If your butts are igniting, you need to turn your smoker down.

I did the same.

And melted the lid on the tub. So yeah, it gets too hot.

Having a cache owner making an earnest attempt to completely blanket the local map and make it impossible for anyone else to hide a cache literally turned me off of th game for a solid decade.

Even better, HE has since left the game due to health issues - but his geo-garbage is still all over the area.

Well, without knowing what your shit hole country is, it's going to be hard to offer recommendations.

But look at the hunting apparal catalogs you have available - specifically, upland bird hunting. I've got several pairs of Wrangler jeans with 1000-denier cordura nylon facing the fronts, from just below the front pockets to the bottom hem, and then the back side up over my calfs. They're definitely bulkier, but they are great for thorn resistance.

Alternatively, I've got a pair of Columbia hunting chaps that are basically the same material, just goes over the jeans you're already wearing.

Usually, the best luck I have is grabbing the tab, and pulling perpendicular to it -- if the tab, for example, is running from a 9:00-3:00 orientation, grab at 9:00 and pull straight towards 3:00. It *usually* works.

When it doesn't, I have to get a fork or my pocketnife.

Sunglasses are such a personal choice, there is no correct answer here. Personally, I only buy Oakley wire frames, but if that's not the style you like, that doesn't do you any good.

Yep - ours is state mandated to a maximum of $0.64/$1,000 of property valuation. Meaning my $100,000 house, my wife and I pay $64/yr for fire protection. And there's 10,000 residents in my entire COUNTY, with 9 departments covering the combined 578 square miles - average about 10 miles between stations. (two departments are right on the county line, and serve a portion of the adjacent county as well)

I just helped a buddy of mine make his first find, on my most recent hide. Admittedly, it was an evil cache for him to attempt for his first ever cache -- a magnetic micro hidden in the fram of a WW1 era cannon on the courthouse square in front of our fire station, but he decided that's what he was going to do, so I stuck around to offer pointers.

He had a hand within 2" of it probably a half dozen times before he finally zeroed in and was looking directly at it but couldn't see until I offered him the flashlight I usually carry. Three seconds later, "SON OF A...."

The smoker we use is a converted 500 liter milk chiller from a dairy operation, with an old cast iron stove bolted to it for a firebox and dual 6" chrome exhaust stacks off a semi, all mounted on a trailer. She's a beast, and we store it along the side wall of our station in front of our 1924 Seagrave truck that doesn't leave the station anymore. It's not technically "ours", but the guy that owns it doesn't have room to store it anymore, and in exchange for storing it, we have free use of it whenever we want.

Thermal mass is a factor, but in the case of most commercially made smokers, the heat source is already outputting heat in excess of what is needed, with 'waste' heat being constantly exhausted, essentially rendering the thermal mass factor irrelevant.

In your quest to be "right", you've overlooked one crucial factor:

If you are cooking at 225, each individual pork butt is exposed to....225 degrees. It knows not if it is the only piece of meat in the smoker, or if there's 6 more. As long as you are able to maintain that 225 degrees in your cook chamber, each piece of meat is seeing that same 225 degrees. Might it take slightly more fuel to maintain that 225, sure, you've got a little more thermal mass to overcome - but that's still mostly overshadowed by the fact that the bulk of your heat loss is still through the vents.

By your logic that 4 roasts took up to 20% longer to cook, when my fire department does our annual pork dinner and smokes 22 butts at once, it should take about a day and a half. But we run the same timeline that I do cooking one at home.

As someone observed earlier, physics doesn't care what kind of smoker you use

That was me. You're trying to quote me to disprove me. And doing a bad job of it.

If you can logically explain to me how two pieces of meat, in the same temperature environment, somehow take longer to cook than a single piece of meat in *that same exact temperature environment*, I'd love to hear it.

The reality is, if you have to ask the question if it's worth restoring or not, you don't actually understand everything that is going to be involved, and should not be undertaking it as a DIY project.

When you get close to Ground Zero (about 30', especially on non-urban caches), look at the direction your GPS is sending you and estimate your distance - and then put the device away and start looking for anything out of the ordinary or places you'd hide something. Try to avoid doin the "dance of the drunken bumblebee" chasing your GPS around to get exactly 0.0 ft to the cache - your GPS isn't that accurate.

You'll have a lot better success. Welcome to the hobby!

The air inside a smoker is all heated to the same temp - yes, the meat is going to cool the air immediately around it somewhat, but let's be honest - you're losing more heat out the vent than you are to cooling by the meat.

On my weak, underpowered OG Bradley, it didn't matter if I had a pork loin on by itself, or a pork loin, a rack of ribs, two sausages, and a pan of beans.

Maybe find a metal fabrication shop in your area and see if they could help out - otherwise, get real creative with a hydraulic bottle jack and something REALLY heavy.

Honestly probably going to be more trouble than it's worth, and the odds of ever getting it truly flat - or even decently close - aren't great.

And possibly the fuel door.

If it's well-watered, it's not granular fertilizer anymore, it's been dissolved and absorbed into your soil profile. Non issue.

Is there risk? Sure.

Are you overblowing the risk? Unless your grass crunches when you walk on it, and your house is shingled with tinder-dry cedar shakes, absolutely.

Here's a test: Go stand in your yard with a box of matches. Light one. Drop it on the grass. If it doesn't start a self-sustaining fire, in all likelihood, neither will a consumer firework.

Time to cook is a function of the thickness/weight of the individual cuts, so adding a second butt doesn't affect the overall time.

For reference, I have a Recteq 410.

This is essentially never relevant. Heat is heat, 225 degrees in a Recteq is 225 degrees in a WSM, or 225 degrees in an offset.