One weekend closer on the BBQ pit

So I've found new energy to finish my BBQ pit. Mainly because our annual BBQ is coming up, in June it'll be 1 year in the making, it's getting warmer, and my recent experience at the Houston Live Stock Show and Rodeo has fueled my fire to cook for larger groups of people.

This past weekend I really put in some time on the pit. First thing to do was get a counterweight on the lid for the barrel pit. At 109lbs that hunk of steel was a real challenge to mount up there. It's amazing that it's as straight as it was. Prior to mounting the weight I had the lib propped up on a piece of round bar. Yep, you guess it I knocked the round bar out and the lid fell on my left arm. OUCH!!!! I have a nice bruise but fortunately I didn't break it.

Work continued for the rest of the day without further issue. At the end of the day I had an exhaust stack mounted and the shelf guides were going in.

Sunday started out good. By 8:30 I was actually working. By 9:30 I was stuck. The tip on my plasma torch needed to be replaced. I decided to also replace the electrode since it looked worn out too. Big mistake. The electrode has gotten stuck in there and when I tried loosening it with a pair of pliers the soft copper just crumbled. OK, I thought, I'll just drill it out a little. 3 hours later I managed to get the electrode out. In the process I think I damaged the seat just slightly because I have to "whack it" on the metal cutting surface to get started. None the less, I was able to keep going once I replaced the electrode. This little set back cost me valuable time for the day and by the end of the day I had just finished the 3 removable shelves. I still have to complete the little side shelves before I can fire the barrel pit up for it's first smoke test. I know it's going to leak, the question how bad and in how many places.

The good news is that I'll have 4,500sq inches of cooking space. The rotisserie will have between 7,900 and 11,880 sq inches of cooking space depending on whether I go with 2 or 3 shelves per spindle. Yes I said 3 shelves. After building the shelves for the barrel pit which ended up having 6 inches of useable space between the shelves I'm now considering 3 shelves per spindle with 5" of space between them. That would give the top shelf at least 18 " inches of cooking so I could easily put beans, briskets, pulled pork, beer can chicken and more on the top shelves. But when the need arose I'd be able to cook between 105 and 150 baby back ribs at once. Now that's capacity!

The real question is whether I want to go back to the steel store for another sheet of expanded metal and more 1" angle iron. Since I'm planning to build the shelves in a jig it's just as easy to cut up 15 shelves as it is 10.

Another way to think about this is that I could cook 100 racks of ribs AND briskets all at the same time. If you then consider the fact that ribs take me about 5 hours now and only 3 of them are on smoke, the cooking capacity in a full day is enough for a small army. I could easily serve 200 racks of ribs and 30 briskets between lunch and dinner. Now who's going to clean this mess up?

Progress on the BBQ pit

Last June I finally pulled the trigger on the construction of my first large BBQ pit. The smart thing to do would have been to start out small and just make something larger than I currently have with my New Braunsfel smoker. But then again that's not me. When I do something I usually try to go all out. That's why my new pit will have a rotisserie and dual cooking chambers.

Fast forward to today and I've spent about $2500 in materials and I'm still not there yet... Yesterday I picked up about 800lbs of steel to make all the shelves and rotisserie as well as a big hunk of steel to act as a counter weight for the barrel pit door. So here it is currently:


I've got to add the exhaust stacks (which I picked up in yesterday's steel run) and build all the shelves and the rotisserie. No small task but it's definitely come a long way.

Last night and a good part of this morning I spent trying to figure out the motor situation. Unfortunately I bit off more than I could chew when I decided I wanted to cook between 70 and 100 racks of baby back ribs at once. The torque load on the rotisserie is somewhere between 1500 - 2000 in. lbs when loaded. So my inexpensive $300 motor turned out to be too weak. Fortunately Barry at Electric Motor Warehouse helped me to find just the right 1/2hp motor that I could gear down to 6RPM and nicely exceed the 2000 in. lb. requirement. The only problem, $500 ouch! But it's all in the name of BBQ.

So now I have this motor on it's way to me, actually it's at the factory where they are assembling the gears. Now I need to order the sprockets and chain. Oh oh! I found the drive sprocket at Graingers but they don't sell to the public. So Google to the rescue! I've found a manufacturing company in Indiana called B & B Manufacturing. Their website claims that they can modify the sprockets they manufacture. Hopefully they can modify the sprockets I need without breaking the bank. I'm waiting on a response to my email.

Sounds like I've almost got it all together. Well except for the bearings. I'd like to use food grade bearings even though the Q will probably never come close to touching that part of the pit. I've got a request out to a company who has told me they can handle an order as small as 4 bearings but so far I haven't heard back from them. There are some 4 bolt flange bearings in an e-bay store that I'm looking at as well. Hopefully I can come up with something in the bearing department soon.

One cool thing I managed to pick up while searching on ebay was a pair of triple burner cast iron stoves. I haven't figured out where I'm going to mount them just yet but they will definitely come in handy. I may try to find a piece of stainless steel to make a griddle to fit over one of them.


Work continues, and the motorcycle riding is on the back burner until it's finished.

Pictures are available at http://brian.lonestarsupport.com/gallery/bbqpit

Treo700p Bluetooth DUN it!

So I've managed to get my Bluetooth DUN working on the Treo700P with my N800 but I hadn't tried it with my HP Laptop. Well this morning I'm going to take my laptop to an environment where cables aren't going to be the best thing in the world. So I thought I'd give it a try.

I already had the /dev/rfcomm0 device set up from previous endeavors to get the HotSync working. (It does btw).

I tried connecting to /dev/rfcomm0 with minicom and kept getting ^M errors. Thankfully Google to the rescue! I stumbled across this link. That also pointed me to this link at Guru Labs which walks you through the whole process step by step. Between these 2 pages I got the one thing I needed. RESET THE BLUETOOTH on the phone. Once I did that, presto!!! I have a connection.

So now any time I have my laptop and my phone I can get connectivity even when I forget the cables.

Speed is better than a modem I guess:

More N800 fun

So I've found all sorts of distractions this week with my Nokia N800 but I've also learned a lot about it. Talking to another user of the N800 I got a different perspective on it and what it means to other people.

I found a great blog where the user talks about useful mods you can make to your N800 like dual booting with your internal SD card, activating virtual memory and more. I'm interested to see his suggestion for backup in the unit.

I've successfully installed Gizmo. This little program allows me to use my N800 as a sip phone with my Asterisk server at the house. Currently I'm running the very old ASterisk@Home 2.2 but thought I'd try out the newer Trixbox 2.0 in a VM. In testing the new set up I figured out what Gizmo was doing. They didn't actually write it such that the secondary account settings logged directly into your server, but instead they seem to proxying the connection through their servers. Not a big deal but you have to make your Asterisk server available to the web in order to test things. I've also noticed that I can't dial numbers starting with the * symbol. Those calls get routed to the Gizmo network. So Gizmo's not a perfect sip phone for your Asterisk box but it seems to work pretty good. This setup also explains why I have a 1 to 1.5 second delay when I establish a call via Gizmo through my Asterisk box.

I also have managed to find and install ping and traceroute on the garage.maemo.org site. It comes up under a search for "basic networking tools" but yet not when you search for ping. Uuuuug! Also installed the bind tools unfortunately it doesn't look like it included dig. Maybe I'll try compiling that myself. I need to get my dev VM working first though.

Battery life was pretty good today. I made it until 5pm before I had to plug it in. I wasn't using it heavily most of the day but it was on and reachable via the network. So that's not too bad.

my n800

So last Friday I was in CompUSA looking around since they are going to close the store near me. Just my luck they have/had a Nokia N8OO left and it was on sale. Of course I couldn't pass up a bargain so I got it.

Within The first 24 hrs I had To reload the flash because it would no longer boot

Currently I have it connecting via my wifi and my treo7OOP Phone

As you probably notice from the miXed case I'm still learninG how To use The handwriting system

The neatest thing so far is that I have Openvpn worKinG so I can connect to My office when I'm out and about. VNC worKs surprisingly well.