22” WSM with a Pellet Pro & CB Stacker

[duff645]

Bought a used 22" WSM last summer from another WKC Club Memeber (SteveMBH).  Decided to add a Pellet Pro 12" Hopper and a Cajun Bandit Stacker (along several other CB accessories).  And today, I am smoking 3 baby back ribs and 2 beef short ribs in it.

Here's the build on attaching the Pellet Pro onto the WSM.  Thanks to several testimonies from this site, I tried to find out a way to insert the hopper into the WSM without cutting the bottom bowl of the WSM.  So I ordered a rotisserie ring from Weber, got it here and found out that it was too short to hold the bracket supports from Pellet Pro.  So I ordered a stacker from Cajun Bandit which was more suitable for this project:

Directly 180 degrees from the stacker's partition weld and the cut-out pattern provided by SmokeDaddy Inc, I placed the tape measure at the 8 3/4" mark and measured off another 4" on each side.  I measured off the vertical position of the holes, 1 1/4" from the stacker's underside of the top lip.  Drilled the holes and cut out the box shape per the master pattern.  Carefully measurements and cutting needs special attention here, otherwise another stacker will needed to be ordered.

Fasten the hopper's vertical support brackets onto the stacker's drilled holes and insert the hopper's auger housing into the stacker's cut-out slot.  Then fasten using the hardware provided by Pellet Pro.

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[duff645]

Afterwards, I attached the CB Wheel and Cylinder Lock components to the bottom bowl of the WSM.  I felt that the Pellet Pro needed some support here and was too high to use the CB support legs that was included in the kit, so I had to improvise on how to get two extended legs underneath the hopper housing to support 30 # of pellets in the hopper:  1" square tubes was my thought.

Next, I went to Home Depot to buy some 1/4" dia nuts & bolts and a 36" x 1" square tube - zinc plated.  Cut two lengths of 16 3/4" each and on two of the sides (that will be fastened onto the housing), I cut out half (on the diagonal) of the square tube so that I can fasten the nuts inside the hopper's housing.

Not confident that two holes would suffice holding the PP Housing (my engineering background), I decided there was room to drill another set of holes (one on each side) to add a third set of hardware to fasten the square bar onto the housing.

Please note:  since I choose to use the CB's wheel locks, the square bar's 16 3/4" length gave me ample room to attach bottom side leg adjusters at the bottom of the bars.  Otherwise, you can can also cut the square bars at 17" each.

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[duff645]

Here comes the tricky part.  The middle section of the WSM does NOT fit snuggly on top of the modified CB stacker.  But a while back, I saw a YouTube video of someone flipping there WSM's middle section and that fitted the stacker and the WSM's dome section very well.  In order to keep the bottom wire rack to be too close to the fire pot, I flipped the four brackets around (using the bottom hole as a guide and drilling another set of holes into the WSM's center section.  I filled the used holes (now at the bottom of the center section with hardware to prevent leakage.

I also flipped the digital controller to the other side of the hopper housing.

Once that was all set, I also followed Pellet Pro's instructions and attached four heat diffuser brackets onto the auger housing above the burn pot.  Lastly, I replaced the original door with one from CB (even though it will be upside down). 

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[duff645]

Now I filled the hopper with hickory pellets and set the temp at 275F and wait .....

First observations:  top of the dome temp is about 150F, but that because it maybe due to the fact that its 40F out here in the Detroit area.  She puts out smoke when the internal WSM temps drops 10F below.  No billowing smoke effect (maybe because of the tight seals?)

[Mike in Roseville]

That is amazing! Thanks for sharing!


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[duff645]

Before:  3 racks of baby back pork & two racks of beef short ribs

After:  not bad, baby back had adequate amount of smoke flavor (sat on the bottom most rack for three hours @ 275F;  beef ribs had very little smoke ring on the top portion (?should have smoked them meat side down?).

Scenario:  275F (some fluctuations between 265-300F, but that could have been the cold blustery day we had here) for 7 hrs;  not bad though!!

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[swamprb]

Nice build and excellent write up! It's unfortunate you had to cut up the Stacker. That's what Dennis at Smoke Daddy was doing before partnering with Cajun Bandit to come up with the Stacker conversion.
I love mine and used it for years with the Stacker but grew tired of it not exactly being portable and ditched the Stacker in favor of sacrificing a 22" Kettle instead.
The temp fluctuations you mentioned sounds normal with the old style controller. Does yours have the PID controllers?



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[duff645]

The temp fluctuations you mentioned sounds normal with the old style controller. Does yours have the PID controllers?

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Yes it is, according to your picture comparison and the literature provided by Dennis with the kit.  By the way .... hats off to both SmokeDaddy Inc and Cajun Bandit.  Very helpful on their support of their fine product(s).

And kudos to swamprb on your fine effort as well.  We had many exchanges of email, but I could not find a spare genesis grill to a similar modification as yours!!  Since I might be using the WSM as a separate smoker, I choose to not to limit myself by cutting bottom bowl and permanently use the WSM as a pellet smoker and choose to go with a notched out stacker instead.  I still plan on disassembling the stacker/pellet smoker addition and storing this subsystem in my garage (and keeping the original WSM covered in my backyard).  I do not want the mice to setup shop in my PID controller over the frigid temperatures of SE Michigan.  I do strongly suggest your set-up to others as well.

Now if I can find a pellet mixture that has charcoal pellets intermixed in with my various hardwood blends ..... as they say in the 70s - "As the Auger Turns"

[cumminfourya]

That's an awesome set up. Thanks for sharing and great right up.


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[TimberbeastWaco]

I cant see any of the pictures

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