Homemade Pig Cooker

[huntnfish]

A buddy and I had been talking about making a pig cooker out of an old fuel oil barrel for quite some time. Usually it was discussed over beverages and, like most things dreamt up over a few beers, really didn't look like it would ever become a reality. That all changed when I volunteered my friend to cook for a large event. The initial plan was to cook a whole pig and my buddy has done that before but always on a rented cooker. The talk started again about making our own but the difference now was that he had the barrel. I had an old trailer that was doing nothing but rotting the tires off so we decided to put our money where our mouth is.

We had a guy lined up to do the welding and help with the fabricating ideas but that fell through so we ended up doing it all ourselves on the Saturday before he was to be cooking for around 100 people. Very poor planning but with both of us having jobs and families it was our last chance before accepting defeat and renting one.

We started off by cutting the tank in half with a metal cutting circular saw and wire brushing the inside. This went much better than either of us expected. The tank had been sitting empty for many years and had thousands of gallons of water run through it last summer to help flush it out. There was about 3 gallons of rust that we

cleaned out of the tank.

After that we went to work getting the deck off the trailer. All we wanted was the main frame from the trailer. While this was being done I wire brushed all the inside wire a grinder. This was not a fun task with all the dust. Its been a couple weeks and I'm pretty sure I'm still cleaning it out of places it shouldn't have gotten into.

From there we mounted the tank to the trailer with 2 inch square tubing and welded it to the frame. We didn't get anything else for pictures of the construction process but it was pretty much like you'd imagine. We're kicking ourselves now for not getting more but we were both dirtbag filthy and sweating like crazy.

We wanted to make this into a propane cooker for ease of use and also temperature control. He built the burner from scratch and a little help from the internet. Its basically 1" pipe with slits cut into it with a sawzall a little less than halfway through. After that all you do is out the slits down and light it up. We're eventually hoping to put some sort of igniter on it but we were very short on time. The flames roll around the pipe very nice and we were very happy with how the burner ended up.

I smeared the inside with lard to help season it and also to help prevent rust from forming on the bare metal.

Here is how it looks right now. I made a small deck platform on the front out of plastic deck boards.

We cooked 12 boston butts on it and they turned out phenomenal! For some reason the stars aligned and everything went well. We probably shouldn't have tried this type of feed right off the bat but like they say go big or go home. This was the maiden venture for the cooker but we're hoping to have lots of dead pig lying on the grates.

We have all kinds of plans and upgrades that we want to do but didn't have time before it needed to be used. So far its been interesting and fun and we've got all kinds of plans for upgrades. We both learned that neither of us know how to weld but we made it work. Like I told my friend. Someone has to go home with the ugly girl. Right now I think we're at about $150 into it so it hasn't been as expensive as some of my "projects" yet.

[Gordie]

Looks great huntnfish and thanks for sharing,

I did one similar for the church in Princeton but made it into a two hog roaster with the burners on the right and left sides and a place to burn charcoal and woo down the center and the front and back

[huntnfish]

Thanks Gordie. One of the main things we want to get done before its next use is some sort of tray for wood so we can get some good smoke going. We had some cobs of wood in the bottom but it didn't work as well as we had hoped. This cooker turned out to be a lot more work than we had anticipated but it still wasn't bad.

[Moose]

We ran 2 threaded rod through ours and put another piece of expanded steel on it to hold the wood. Trick is to figure out where the proper height above the burner is to smoke and not just burn up the wood.