Bradley Original Smoker not always advancing bisquettes

[Skippy39us]

Folks,
Here's the problem: At random times, the advancing mechanism will not successfully advance my bisquettes.

This only happens sometimes. It seems that the "push plate" (the piece that retracts, allows the bisquettes to drop, and then pushes the bisquettes forward) is not always pullling itself far enough away to allow the next bisquette to drop.

Here's a video of it failing, when I've taken the generator apart.  By the way, I had manually advanced several bisquettes before this successfully. This one was failing over and over.  Later, I put the _same_ bisquette in, and it worked fine.

This happens at random times, with random bisquettes.  There is no rhyme or reason. I cannot seem to determine what can be done to make the push plate retract completely for proper operation. And again, this doesn't happen all the time, but happens at least one time per smoke.

Here's the video. As you can see, nothing is getting stuck mechanically. The motor is successfully turning without obstacle.  Its just not retracting all the way.

https://youtu.be/nrO3qdRPKhc


- Thanks,

Todd

[Habanero Smoker]

Hi Todd;

Sorry to welcome you to the forum is such a manner.

Thanks for the video, that clears up what the problem is. I've never seen anything like this. At first I thought the front of the bisquette was getting caught up on something, but after viewing it a few times it was clear the push plate was not retracting all the way. The only thing that I notice that may be causing the problem is the rod that connect the push plate to the "arm" that is connected to the motor. It seem to be somewhat loose, and the part of the rod that is connected to the "arm" seems to travel further then the part of the rod attached to the pusher plate. But this may be the normal way that part of the mechanism works.

By watching the rotation of the arm (you only get glimpses of it) it seemed that the motor did reversed each time the bisquette didn't drop. Check to make sure there are no obstructions on the guiderail (the area the push plate travels); or the guiderails may need to be adjusted.

Either if you find a fix or not, you should send the video to Bradley to get their input. They sometime monitor this forum, so they may respond here, but it's better to contact them directly.

[Dwim]

Just like you I have an Original Bradley Smoker that does the same thing. The mechanism is loose and doesn't always retract far enough back. I used a couple of strips of newspaper to bias the pucks to one side. This fixed the problem completely.


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