Propane Modification to Campsite Smoker

Due to the dry conditions in Central Oregon, the Deschutes National Forest has enacted fire restrictions about a month and a half earlier than normal.

For campers this means NO charcoal or wood fires, though gas and propane stoves are fine.

This is a problem, because one of my pleasures when camping is smoking ribs and chicken. It takes about five hours to properly slow-cook a rack or two of ribs, and for this I bring my little Old Smokey #14 Charcoal Smoker -- it's lightweight and small, and does a perfectly fine job.

But it does use charcoal, so I can't legally (or safely) use it until next year. There are propane smokers, I have one at the house, but every one I've looked at is too large and too heavy to bother bringing.

What's a girl to do? I could simply not smoke anything, but that's no fun.

So I decided to create another of my famous unnecessarily complex solutions.

First, I purchased a cheap single burner propane stove:

Once the reflector/pot stand was removed, I unsnapped the burner assembly and passed the stove's carburetor tube into the opening on the bottom of the smoker, re-attached the burner, and lit it.

But even on the lowest setting, the temperature in the smoker was too high for slow cooking. I smoke and cook ribs at 220 degrees F, and this thing headed north of 250 degrees and kept climbing. Thems is grillin' temperatures, not smokin' temperatures.

The stove's valve has detents for each heat setting, but they are buried inside the body of the stove, and I could not find a way to take the thing apart without damaging the plastic valve assembly, which is press-fit into the pot metal body. And the detents are quite aggressive: you can't balance the knob at a halfway point between "off" and "low" without the shaft snapping to either the "off" or "low" position.

Covering up some of the holes in the burner would be of no use since the actual nozzle is at the bottom of the carburetor tube, and unless I could find a replacement jet with a much smaller opening, no matter how many burner holes are covered, the amount of propane being released would not change -- only the flame pattern.

I examined the stove and saw that wotating the knob actually pushes the shaft into the valve body, which opens the valve. You can squeeze the shaft inward and open the valve.

What I needed was a means to easily squeeze the shaft into the body, with fine control over how far in the shaft gets pressed.

So, here's what the stove looks like with the knob and reflector off:

I modified an old C-clamp by removing the foot from the end of the threaded shaft and grinding the end to a point so it will seat in the hole on the end of the knob shaft:

Put some Velcro on the other end of the clamp.

And a matching patch of Velcro on the backside of the valve body.

Now the C-clamp can be mounted to the stove:

At this point, I found that I had very fine control over the stove heat, and it can be turned down to a whisper. 

So -- sit the smoker bottom over the stove:

(I will sort out a somewhat less-clunky means to get the smoker high enough to fit the stove under -- the Old Smokey company makes longer legs and that's probably the way I will go.)

Snap the burner back on inside the smoker:

And I'm good to go. Initial tests show that set to a very low setting, the smoker doesn't go over 150 degrees -- this should give me plenty of control over the heat.

And that's your Uncle Jack's Unnecessarily Complicated Solution to an Otherwise Trivial Problem.