New member from KCMO home of the KCBS and the 2015 World Series Champions

[jharner]

Welcome to the pit, enjoy the Wikipedia of BBQ.

[Spinaker]

Welcome to the Pit, We are happy to have you!!

[Danjohnston949]

rat88, Welcome to the Pit! You are Now Enrolled in the BBQ University! Attendance is Mandatory! I see You have Met some of the Professors!
Eat Well and Prosper! From a Backyard Cremator in Fargo ND, Dan

[fuzzydaddy]

rat88 on this page: http://amazingribs.com/pitmaster_club/index.html scroll down to "Support for Operation BBQ Relief" and you'll see that a portion of all membership fees are donated to Operation Barbecue Relief. Again, welcome to The Pit!

[rat88]

Thanks for all of the greetings. I stated that I am from KCMO, actually I live in a little town south of KC.. Pleasant Hill Missouri.
If you have heard of that and cant remember why, it is the headquarters for Operation BBQ Relief and a friend of mine was one of the founding members. I saw something about OBR while snooping around this site, but cant remember where it was. You can go to operationbbqrelief.org for more info

[Black99vette]

rat88 welcome! Cool to see people who build their own pits. It would be great to see some pictures when you have time. I'd love to build a smoker someday. Good excuse to learn how to weld. And KC is a great place to head for BBQ. During a business trip detour (planed) I was able to make it to Arthur Bryant's.

[Huskee]

Welcome to The Pit rat88! Nice meeting you and great intro story. We're glad you're here with us! We'd lvoe to see some pics of your homemade smokers.

Since this is your first post, please check out our homework assignment post for new members, it contains a few how-tos and please-dos. This will help you learn your way around so you can get the best experience from our forum.

Also, it's very important that you add the domain AmazingRibs.com to your email safe list in case you are ever drawn as our monthly Gold Medal Giveaway winner!

Hope to hear & see more from you!

[MattTheGR8]

Sounds like you've made some great progress in the last 20 years, welcome to the Pit. Let's go Royals!

[Thunder77]

Welcome to the Pit! We're glad you're here!

[MBMorgan]

Welcome to the Pit!

[SoonerBQuer]

Awesome beginings story! welcome rat88

[CeramicChef]

rat88 - welcome to The Pit and welcome to The Obsession!

I do like those KC Royals!

[rat88]

I was directed here say Hi.
I have been a backyard basher for around 20 years, but have done a few competition cooks. All of my pits are home built stuff, mostly based on the vertical water smoker concept. I also have a horizontal offset made from a water heater tank and a propane fired version of the UDS that I used for smoking homemade sausages.

My cooking career started some where around '95 when my wife said she wanted to do a hog roast. My first question was "how in the hell do you roast a hog?". That was back before there were sites like this, the internet was just getting started at that time.
After asking a few old timers, I dug a hole in the yard about the size of a coffin and borrowed a rack made from an old bumper jack. We got a 200#er on the hoof and started the butchering process (not fun). The pig was ready to go and I quickly realized that I needed wood. I searched the hedge rows for any downed limbs. I gathered a good pickup load. Then I proceeded to load the pig on the grate and start the fire (yes, in that order). I had no concept of cooking time or temp. After about 4 hours and 16 beers, a leg pulled off while I tried to turn it.... "WTF??? it must be done... now what the hell do I do?"

You can imagine how that one turned out. It was at that point I decided I either need to quit cooking or learn how to do it right. I built a smoker big enough to cook a whole hog and I still use it today. It is 6 foot tall x 5 1/2 long and 2 1/2 deep.