Garbage Can Turkey Smoker

Step 3 Add heating element

For our heat source, we used a $10 electric hotplate. We cut a small hole on the side of the can near the bottom for the cord and access to the heat-adjustment knob. Then, we added two "smoke rocks" to prevent the wood chip pan from falling off of the hotplate and to add overall stability to the smoker. These were just rocks from our front yard. If you have bricks, you might consider using those instead.

To actually turn the knob, we constructed a simple extension to the knob by gluing the plastic knob covering to a hole drilled in the end of a dowell. However, it turned out that we always wanted the heat all the way up, so this was never used during the actual cooking, once we calibrated the device.

You might consider putting the hot plate more in the center to have better heat shielding from the pan and more even smoke release, but I don't think it really matters. We were prevented from doing that by the geometry of our smoke rocks, but with bricks you could swing it.

Feed the cord through the hole at the bottom and attach to a properly rated extension cord.