Sometime back, I bought a McCall warmer/proofer from a school system auction for around $85 including the auction fees. What I liked about this unit was the heating element was on top, and two fans ducted air across the element and down a channel on the right side of the inside of the cabinet with a series of louvers to distribute the recirculate the heated air through the cabinet. It's basically a convection warmer. All stainless exterior and interior. It has a ton of brackets and is set up to hold full sized pans with room on all sides for air circulation. This was the only one like this I had seen, and this looked perfect for conversion to a smoker for snack sticks and sausage smoking. Fans work, but heating element does not energize (I have not traced the circuit to see if the element is good or if the problem is the thermostat of high limit switch). I will convert to PID in the build anyway.
Only problem is this sucker is huge. I mean it is like over 7 1/2 feet tall. So between that and the dread of having to pull the blown in foam insulation out, I've sort of just let this sit in a corner and gather dust. Last night I was wondering if I could just use the stainless from the unit as donor panels to custom make up a smaller version.
Then today I came up with a novel idea which may or may not be workable. Why cannot I cut say 2 feet out of the cabinet at the bottom and have the stainless re-welded at the base to make a shorter cabinet? Do any of you have any rough estimates of what that sort of welding might run? I presume it's 304 stainless since it's food service grade. Would be a lot less work than completely building a cabinet from scratch and would be a fairly straight forward conversion.
So am I crazy or is this going to be cost prohibitive?
This is the cabinet. Door is off and the side louver panel is off, but you get the general idea of what I'm dealing with.
This is an illustration of how the flow of air/smoke works and I added a pellet tray for proof of concept only (design may change)
Only problem is this sucker is huge. I mean it is like over 7 1/2 feet tall. So between that and the dread of having to pull the blown in foam insulation out, I've sort of just let this sit in a corner and gather dust. Last night I was wondering if I could just use the stainless from the unit as donor panels to custom make up a smaller version.
Then today I came up with a novel idea which may or may not be workable. Why cannot I cut say 2 feet out of the cabinet at the bottom and have the stainless re-welded at the base to make a shorter cabinet? Do any of you have any rough estimates of what that sort of welding might run? I presume it's 304 stainless since it's food service grade. Would be a lot less work than completely building a cabinet from scratch and would be a fairly straight forward conversion.
So am I crazy or is this going to be cost prohibitive?
This is the cabinet. Door is off and the side louver panel is off, but you get the general idea of what I'm dealing with.
This is an illustration of how the flow of air/smoke works and I added a pellet tray for proof of concept only (design may change)
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