While my controller was great most of the time, I didn't trust it to get to far away because of how I had seen it act in the past. I had bought this controller used quite a few years ago and figured why not swap them. I sent it back to Smoke Daddy who updated it and returned, it came with a new RTD when I bought it. I wanted to do the wheel upgrade, I had seen a gentleman on facebook do his like this it seemed easy enough, and I also found some small latches to put on as my door leaked top and bottom corners. Once I turned it on its side and started looking I could see places where smoke was escaping underneath, I had noticed it and thought is was coming from the drip tube but it had several smoke leaks as I saw. I had some black RTV I just put over them.
I wanted to run the RTD wires down to the bottom but the panels are spot welded and riveted, and I suspect there are braces inside between the 2 walls, not sure if the oils would penetrate and cause issues with the wires so I just drilled a hole through the cabinet. Smoke Daddy had told me to try to put the RTD in the middle of the cooker. I was going to mount it with SS screws, but decided to clean the spot well with some acetone and use a bit of red RTV.
I used 3/4" flexible conduit, 1/2" would work but with 3/4 the plugs could be slid through it if needed. I didn't have the right size bit for the screws I had to mount the controller, that is why it is taped in. The local hardware store loved me over the weekend. I still need to get some sort of covering for the RTD wire.
The wheels are on with 1/4 course thread, I noticed they were kind of sloppy so I used 3/4" long with flat washers and applied some pipe sealant I had to kind of fill in the space in the threads, didn't want to use loctite in case I wanted to change them as I had thought of different ways of doing them as I was working on it. The other bolt is 1/4x1 with 1 1/2" diameter fender washers. The door latches I used #8x1/2 SS screws that fit the countersink in the latches. Had thought about buying a rivet nut tool but after reading about how easily the mandrels break on the smaller nuts I just used the screws.
Thinking about my next addition being a a rheostat to be able to run only the fan if I want to cold smoke and keep some air moving through. I see Smoke Daddy makes a convection fan for their vertical, I did a little searching to find parts to make one, but probably easier to buy one from them.
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Topic: Copperhead 7 Mods/upgrades. (Read 1933 times)