Anyone make their own pucks?

[RAF128]

Yesterday I was in a meat shop buying some spices.    Chatted with the fellow who owns and he gave me a few tips.    Anyway during the conversation the Bradley came up and he thought it was expensive to run, mainly the cost of pucks.   He asked it I ever considered making my own.    Said what I'd need is some sort of form that was the right size.   Then mix up some food grade gelatin and mix with the wood chips.    Once the gelatin sets you've got puck.    What are your thoughts?

[ArnieM]

I believe I've come across a couple of posts where it was tried with little or no success.

I get my pucks at Amazon, average of $49/120 ct box.  That comes out to $3.60 for 3 hours of smoke.  I couldn't compete with that making them at home between time and materials.

FYI - I think the binder used is collagen.

[RAF128]

Around here I buy pucks for $19.99 for a box of 40 I believe.    Ordering from Amazon wouldn't be a big saving for me, if any IMO.   First off there's the exchange, then the shipping, then the brokerage fees when it comes across the border.    Making my own was a thought but don't know if it would work.   

[squirtthecat]

I'd have to agree.    I do the '4 for 3' deals from Amazon when they have them, and they come out to 28 cents a puck.


[edit]   Ok, I see you are in Canada, eh.

Maybe if you had some wood shavings laying around, and a mechanism to hold them on the puck burner..

Almost like a bubba pucks that were 98% hollow.   Just an aluminum shell to hold the shavings, that would in turn advance and drop off into the water bowl.    The aluminum+machining itself would cost more than a box of pucks.

It would take some trial & error to get the amount of shavings right for the 20 minute cycle.

[Tenpoint5]

I believe there is a forum member that hasn't been on in a while. West Coast Sausage Maker that has an Ebay store that is reasonable and he is in Canada

[squirtthecat]

Here it is:

http://stores.shop.ebay.ca/West-Coast-Food-Machines

[anderson5420]

Well, this thought occurred to me too, as I have an SMI smoker as well, and I can tell you using pans full of sawdust is a WHOLE lot less expensive than the dang Bradley pucks. But I like my OBS because of the separate smoke generator, so I don't have to open the door and I can (more or less) cold smoke stuff that needs cold smoke. The cost is a factor, but then too so is waiting for an internet delivery or driving 25 miles into Seattle to Outdoor Emporium to buy them (but it is a good excuse to go to Outdoor Emporium, I'll give you that!).

I can probably find a muffin tin that is close to or a bit smaller than the standard Bradley pucks.  I was just wondering what the binder might be. Gelatin might work, may have to give this a try just because (I mean, after all, why do we wire up complicated controllers, build Bradley Hotels, play with custom cold smoke boxes run to the smoker with dryer vent hose? Just because!).

If not gelatin, what other readily available material for binder?

[RAF128]

Well, this thought occurred to me too, as I have an SMI smoker as well, and I can tell you using pans full of sawdust is a WHOLE lot less expensive than the dang Bradley pucks. But I like my OBS because of the separate smoke generator, so I don't have to open the door and I can (more or less) cold smoke stuff that needs cold smoke. The cost is a factor, but then too so is waiting for an internet delivery or driving 25 miles into Seattle to Outdoor Emporium to buy them (but it is a good excuse to go to Outdoor Emporium, I'll give you that!).

I can probably find a muffin tin that is close to or a bit smaller than the standard Bradley pucks.  I was just wondering what the binder might be. Gelatin might work, may have to give this a try just because (I mean, after all, why do we wire up complicated controllers, build Bradley Hotels, play with custom cold smoke boxes run to the smoker with dryer vent hose? Just because!).

If not gelatin, what other readily available material for binder?

It would have to be something food grade.    Forms could be made but you'd have to make several.   They'd have to be the same diameter and thickness.    Don't want to spend a bunch of time making one puck at a time.    This was just a thought as it was mentioned by the fellow in the store.

[manxman]

This may be of some help?

http://forum.bradleysmoker.com/index.php?topic=4368.0

DS only lives a few miles from me and I have been round his house and seen the puck for myself ...... impressive and seem to work very well although not sure if I would have the patience to make my own!

[anderson5420]

Well, since I don't have a machine shop or an exhaust bender, and am not mechanically inclined enough to even understand what I was seeing in the pix, I would be looking for something a little simpler!  Those posts are now 3-4 years old, not much has happened on this front since then? I get the general idea that we are mixing the sawdust with a binder, maybe a flour paste, putting in a tube (with spacers?), applying significant force to compress and then drying or not drying.  Anybody make pucks in the kitchen instead of the machine shop? I have all the sawdust I need, ample flour and/or gelatin, have a bottle jack and can get plastic tubing. I don't know about the Bubba Pucks, cutting aluminum in perfect rounds is a hair beyond my skill set, but using a big hole saw on plastic material might be do-able.  Have to ponder this a bit...

[Tenpoint5]

The reason that the posts are 3-4 years old is that after a very short while it is realized that it is much easier and a lot less hassle to just buy the pucks than to mess around and make your own. But let us know how yours turn out.

[Quarlow]

Yes our pucks in Canada cost $20 for a box of 40, but when you figure out the cost per hour it is $1.47 per hour. To me that is so cheap it is not even worth talking about. When we used my dad's old plywood smoker we would have to use the chainsaw to slice thin discs of Alder and then collect the shavings. We were lucky because My grandfather had a treetopping business so we got all the wood for free, but if we had to buy the wood or go find a stand of alder that we could legally cut, haul it home and dry it out the cost would have made it so expensive and time consuming it would have been cheaper to buy the food. I understand the need to tinker, but this is already the perfect set up with the pucks that there is nothing left to perfect. The amount of collagen used and the exact proper pressure they are pressed to has all been figured out so that everything burns just right. Frankly, I am going to spend my time perfecting my smoking skills and figuring out how to be as good as our guru's on this forum. I have along way to go. My time is worth way more than $1.47 per hour.

[Quarlow]

At my last job I made $30.16 per hour. So I would have to make 45 pucks an hour to equal this.