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I just got my brand new NB Black Diamond pit (Brinkmann Smoke'N Pit Pro) seasoned and I'm all set to go. The only fire I've built in a pit was in my old bullet water smoker. I have some questions.Question: 1. I used a Brinkmann thermometer stuck in the factory hole (about halfway up the lid). Is this anywhere near accurate?This section is a summary of a thread begun by Tom and answered by Harry, Ed, Bear, Kurt, Mike, Rodney, Pat and Jim.Answer: Nope. The temperature in the lid could run anywhere from 25-75F higher than meat rack temperature.Q: 2. I had lots of smoke escaping from both the firebox lid (at the hinge seam) and at the cooking lid (mostly at either end but some along the bottom). Is there a gasket material that would work well? If I do nothing, is it a big loss?A: My SnP Pro does the same thing. I've never bothered to mess with it. Doesn't seem to be a problem except maybe in the winter.Q: 3. Temperature control was iffy. I started up with a small charcoal fire and the inlet damper open 1/4 or so (same for the outlet). It held 225F for a good 30 minutes and then it started to drop a bit. I threw in some more charcoal and opened the inlet and it took a good while to get back up. Overshot (hit 325 - 350F). Closed down on the damper from 3/4 to about 1/2 and the temperature dropped to 220F in less than a minute. Is it that sensitive to damper setting? I had a hard time maintaining any constant temperature.A: You'll continue to have the same problem until you use it many times and get a good feel for it. I had the same problem with mine and found out it wasn't the smoker having the problem, it was me. After many, many uses, I've got it down pretty well. And then the weather changes and you have to figure it out all over again. Ignore what the book says and keep the exhaust damper wide open.Q: 4. I chopped up some oak and wild cherry to try. Every time I added a "log" to my fire, I got thick, white smoke until it caught good. Is this how you do it?A: Yep, it is a smoker. Try smaller pieces if you're worried about incomplete combustion. You can also warm or pre-burn your wood. Get some wood started in another pit or grill and add it hot to the firebox.Q: 5. Speaking of fires, for the second seasoning at 350F, I had 3 or 4, 8 inch long by 2 inch diameter hunks of wood, burning away! Nice flames in the box, not too much smoke visible from the stack. Do you generally have actual flames? How big a fire (quantity of wood) is normal for smoking in a NBBD? Fill 'er up and choke it down or have a small amount and keep adding?A: Stick to a small amount and add to it as you need to or you'll have high temperatures. I like to get my wood burning with just the right flame and then I close down the damper almost, but not quite, all the way. Open the outlet damper up all the way. Control the temperature with the inlet damper. If you close the outlet, the smoke will not vent, get stale, and you've just added that bitter taste everyone complains of to the meat. A big fire choked down will give you bitter smoke.Q: 6. It was really great firing this up for the first time. I just need to learn a few things about the fire before I ruin several hundred dollars worth of meat practicing.A: You probably won't ruin anything. It may not be the way you want it for the first few times, but still better than what you'd get from the local 'Q shack. By the time you learn with an empty smoker, it is too late. When you put meat in the thing, temperature control will be different, as will be the flow of air through it, around the meat. Don't fill it, but put something in it to try, a whole chicken is a good way to start. Just start cooking with it. Experience is the best teacher. I doubt that you will totally ruin much meat, if any.You are going to see some temperature variance, especially when adding more fuel. Once I get the intake damper set, I don't mess with it much. When I add fuel, I leave the side door of the firebox open a little to let in more air and get the fuel burning quicker. When the temperature comes back up I close it. When I first started using my NBBD, I was always opening and closing the intake damper and trying to keep the temperature exactly where I wanted it. I now keep my hands off of it as much as possible and don't worry about 25-35F temperature swings and I get along much better. I cook almost exclusively with wood, although I learned a neat trick of starting a fire with charcoal to provide a good fire bed to get going. I have found that if there is a LOT of smoke (i.e. under the doors and around lids, etc.) there is something wrong with either the air intake or the wood itself. The right-sized fire burns with hardly any visible smoke, that's what you want. You need to keep a good air flow through the unit at all times. This keeps a good clean burn going. Avoid using unseasoned wood, as it will tend to over-smoke and CAN cause bitter meat. Wet bark also can cause this problem. While I can't speak for everybody here, my best results are obtained when there is very little smoke from the stack and none at all from the doors or other openings. I use both vertical and horizontal off-set units (homemade) and usually if there's a bunch of smoke coming from the stack, I know it's time to put the brewskie down and check the fire.You will learn to regulate the temperature by the amount of fire in your firebox. There will always be some open flame, but the best fire is the kind you would cook your marshmallows or "smores" on later. Regulating the amount of fuel, combined with the correct amount of intake air (never choke the exhaust) will give you the best results. You already have lots of good suggestions. I'll add another. I used fiberglass wood-stove gasket to tighten up my NBBD. I found that it gave me much better temperature control, especially on breezy days. Look for flat gasket material, the round stuff is too thick for the doors to close. If all you can find is round material, you can use it on the outside of the NB, butted up against the seams, but not under them like you can with the flat stuff. Using the gaskets has allowed me to start with a much larger load of charcoal to give a longer burn without fiddling with the fire. Before I added the gaskets, I had to use a much smaller charcoal load to keep the fire from getting too hot. This required much more frequent additions of charcoal and a lot more fiddling. The reason was too much air coming in through the gaps.Q: 7. Just for point of reference, I have a grill that's about 12" x 14" that sits in the bottom of the firebox. My first lump charcoal fire was enough to make a 10 inch or so diameter pile that was only a few inches tall at the center. Is this too small? A: I usually start with about 3-4 pounds of lump charcoal. Let it burn down pretty good and add an oak log and let that go for awhile until I get a good bed of coals and can start controlling the temperature. This usually takes an hour to an hour and a half. I then toss on one more log and let it catch fire for about 10 minutes or so. Close up the firebox damper almost all the way, open the lid to the smoke chamber to remove any built-up heat, close it back up and watch the grill level temperature. It will usually be in the general area of 200- 235F at this point. Meat goes on about now. I add a split log about every two to three hours from this point on.I have a NB Hondo, same operating design as yours, just different shelves on the outside. I use two fire grates in the firebox turned so they run across the box and overlap (gets them up higher for better airflow.)Temperature is pretty sensitive to damper positions. I usually move them in very small increments, then wait 15 minutes for things to stabilize before I judge the results. I add split wood (usually ash these days) directly to the fire. I use mesquite lump charcoal to keep things burning, and add a piece of wood as necessary to keep it smoking. The wood burns hotter than the charcoal, take that into consideration in your damper settings as you adjust (maybe add wood instead of opening dampers more). I used to fill it up with charcoal briquettes and choke it down so it would burn a long time without intervention. But I have found that I get a much cleaner, more attractive and better tasting product by using a small hot fire and tending it more often.I use about 10-12 pounds of lump charcoal to smoke all day (brisket or pork shoulder). I don't really know quantitatively how much wood for the same time, probably a half to a whole log 8 inches in diameter and 15 inches long.The only piece of meat I ever ruined was a rack of pork ribs. At the time I thought I had gotten them just way too smoky. They were bitter, overpowering, and inedible. It was the only time I ever tried to use only wood in the smoker. Now, having learned more, I think that rather than being over-smoked that it was a creosote problem, caused by poor airflow in the pit.You probably won't ruin anything, and you've great advice from everybody here. I learned it all by trial and error, until I found this list a few months ago! I'm still the only person I've met face to face who owns a smoker.When I started with NBBD, I had the same problem, temperature spikes and low points. One thing that helped was to stop overreacting. By that I mean, when the temperature shoots up to 350F, don't shut down every damper to bring it down. When the temperature drops to 150F, don't open the intake wide open and dump a full load of hot coals in the firebox. Make small changes or you'll be riding a thermal roller coaster. Once I realized that, even temperatures were easier to maintain.Make sure you're only making small adjustments, even if it appears you need to make big adjustments. If it gets too hot, just close down the INLET damper 1/8th to 1/4 of the way. If you want to get rid of excess heat immediately, open the cooking chamber door a bit. If the temperature drops a bunch, don't dump a truck load of coals in there. Open the damper 1/8 to 1/4 of the way, or add just a few coals. Remember, it could take up to 15 minutes or so for the temperature to react to what you do to the fire or air damper.Another thing you have going for you is that when you put a 12 pound brisket on the grill, you have one heck of a thermal mass there. A brief spike in the temperature will not harm the meat, a short drop in temperature will not add hours to your cooking time.Scott in Carolina--Also, one of the troubles with the Brinkmann SnP Pro and New Braunfels BD is the lack of a damper between the firebox and the cooking chamber. My big Joe has a sliding damper system with convection tube that makes temperature and smoke control a breeze - assuming you have excellent fire-tending skills.One thing we've taken to doing when not burning wood to coals is using smaller logs and placing some actually inside the fire box but away from the fire. We do this before adding them to the fire, it really heats them up and gets them going before we add them. We have very little smoke, and the barbecue never turns out bitter since I learned this trick.Editor--I thought it would be beneficial to those barbecue beginners attempting their first use of a wood-burning off-set firebox smoker to have the step-by-step instructions of a fellow beginner (about 8 months into barbecue) who learned it the hard way--trial and error. This article features the NBBD smoker, but the tips will work on the Hondo and SnP Pro as well.
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