Quick tour of their shop in North Pekin..
Here is a custom rig he is building. They use the same 2 fireboxes on all of their cookers.
But the main attraction is the "Meat Monster". They had them stacked all over ready to be customized and painted.
Slightly different configurations for the fire box. There is the standard 'side loading', and the fancy top loading. He calls it the 'competition fire box'.
The lid is around 180 pounds, so they use this brilliant spring system to help with the lifting.
This is (
WAS) their show model, all gussied up with stainless steel and all of the bling.
This is slick. A hand crank that can lift one or both of the cooking grates. It has a built in braking system, so you can just let go of the crank and it stays dead in place.
Everything is insulated.
Solid construction, for sure.
The stacks are on different levels, so you can tune them to control the heat in the top/bottom of the cooker.
Here is the comp fire box, with a cooking grate next to the smaller charcoal basket.
The bracket is for a rotisserie that you can mount inside right over the fire.
The spring tension is adjustable, so you can make the lid as light or as heavy as you like.
1 rack pulled out. The clearance in this thing is amazing.
Heat deflector in place.
Now the top rack is attached to the bottom rack, so both can be yanked out.
Covering the bottom is a huge catch pan. It slides straight out through the firebox for cleaning. Absolutely brilliant.
There are 3 thermometers. 2 on the lid, and one in the bottom left. That area can be used for holding meat as you can keep it cooler than the top portions. (by tweaking the stacks)