Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Selecting a site 2009 Project of the Year Award!!!

Ah, okay, small caliber rocks. Todd prefers double aught rocks.

Sunil, I was just poking around in a tourist shop and immediately knew I had to have that sign.

In Kansas City BBQ is serious business and we have enjoyed BBQing at the farm. We had a good BBQ smoker that belonged to a friend of Scott's who needed a place to keep it and we used it for four years. It found a new home last October so we needed to replace it and decided to build one. I went to the America Royal BBQ contest in October and looked at smokers and gathered ideas. The last several weeks Jerry has been constructing our new smoker.

Scott the BBQ Chef with the old smoker


A friend who has a machine shop helped me buy this 30" diameter, 5 ft long pipe made of 5/16 inch steel. I had it cut down to 4ft in length.


We also got a 5ft x 10ft x 5/16 inch sheet of steel.


Jerry (he built the dam, the lane, the fence, and about everything else except the cabin) is constructing the smoker and helping me with the design. Here he is cutting out pieces from the sheet of steel.


Building the firebox.


Attaching the firebox to the cooking chamber.


Getting close to being done.


When Jerry finishes I will give it a coat of high temperature paint. It's really heavy duty and will weigh around 1700 lbs. We are hoping it works well, we won't know until we use it. I'll keep you posted.

Now that's what I call a smoker that will last a long time! Looks great.

That's impressive.

What I'm really curious about is who was able to put the Knack on the top shelf?

Dave, I don't understand your question.

Dave, I'm guessing there's a forklift around somewhere. That sheet of 5/16" steel weighed right around 636 pounds......

Jerry has all kinds of ways to lift stuff. He called this afternoon to say the smoker is finished. Tomorrow morning I will go to his place and paint.

Lyle, the Knaack tool box on the top shelf is a heavy box. That's what I was referring to.

Scott that looks like beer can in the A.. chicken on that smoker am I right?

Now I know what a Knack is.

Yes, we make beer can chicken. We have a holder for two beer cans.

Rockytopper, you are correct. Two beer can chickens. We also had a rib rack on the left with five slabs of spare ribs. Oh yeah! I normally take the liberty of volunteering to make sure two half full cans of beer get placed properly in the holder.

so does RockyT

Record bass for our lake caught just five minutes ago by Tom Krehbiel. We were riding in the mule when Tom saw a huge worm. He picked it up and brought it back thinking he would catch a record catfish. He baited up, dropped the worm in and the bass hit instantly.

Way to go, Tom! Lyle, any measurements on the fish? Looks to be in very good condition. Any suspicion on age?

It was a 5 year old, 18 inch, almost 3lb bass. I guess it's just a tad light for 18 inches but it looked really healthy.

I've been intensely busy with improvements and activities at the lake the last month. So busy in fact that I've fallen behind in my posting here at PB. So this is a start at catching up.

We finished up the BBQ smoker and this photo shows it being delivered - all 1500 lbs. The old smoker is in the foreground.


But it's such a nice smoker that we figured it deserved its own 9x16 pad.


We have used it twice so far and it works great. It is very easy to control and maintain a constant 240 degree temperature.

Nice, Lyle! You guys don't actually know how to do anything halfway, do you??!! Awesome work - please keep us in the loop!

True but were not completely sure that's a good thing .

We had a party to honor Mike and Jerry and that was the first use of the new smoker. Jerry did an awesome job of creating the smoker and I promised him that he would be part of its first use.

In the photo left to right, myself, Jerry, Mike, and Scott below. About 99%
of the improvements made to the farm have been done by one or the other of these two or by one of their helpers.

Mike built the cabin and any other carpentry project that we have had. Although a carpenter he also did all the stone work on the cabin.

Jerry built the fence, lane, dam, all dirt work, all concrete work, welding, and probably more stuff that I'm not recalling right now.

What did you cook for the first time ?

Two chickens and three slabs of Kansas City Style spareribs. We had quite a bit left over.

In Kansas City slow cooked BBQ is a big deal - we probably have a hundred BBQ joints in town. And ribs are the highlight of KC BBQ. Everyone has their favorite place - it's almost a religion here. Q is our claim to culinary fame.

When we fired up the smoker the second time it was for a larger group, 27, and we had two chickens, five slabs, a pork shoulder butt, and a venison roast. And it was all good!

Sounds good !!!

Back in May we decided to make it deeper off the end of the boat dock. I haven't been very good at anticipating how things will work out - in this case didn't anticipate that everyone would want to dive off the boat dock, duh, in hindsight that is a no brainer. It was 4 feet going to 6 pretty quickly so it worked for shallow dives but we wanted to make it safer.

In order to get the hoe close enough we had to haul many dump truck loads of rocks from the rock pile on the land and dump them in the water. We had already paid to have those rocks taken out of the little pond and piled, then had the pile moved several years later. So now we paid for two more moving jobs, putting them in for this project and then taking them out and back to the pile

Scott and I probing the water depth. We got it to 8 foot in front of the dock.

One of my favorite weeks each year is the week at the farm with Tom and Jack. Of course now that the cabin is built they want to camp out every night. We spent one night in Scott's box blind, and number of nights at the site shown below. It was a great week. The boys are growing up - its a narrow window of opportunity before they will no longer want to spend a week like this.



Mixing up some "grub" which we cooked over the camp fire.


Box Blind