Here's my post-Christmas smoke.
12.5 lb batch of summer sausage in five 2.75 lb sticks.
Smoked 3 on the racks Saturday.
Then I saw MRH's post above, so I did sorta the same thing. I used a 2.5" wide board with the corners knocked off to make the strings slide on easier. The wide board keeps them hung higher in the cabinet.
The board is 14.5" long, and notched 1" in on each end to .5" remaining thickness. These are some notstandard table saw cuts, so carefull with the fingers . . . My 2x4s were narrowed up to 3.125" so the hanging boards would slide in on top of them. Your BS may need slightly different sizes.
I've also got a narrow board, about 1.5" wide cut the same as the hanging boards--it holds the 2x4s in place so they don't fall off the shelf support while I'm loading the sausage. The narrow board gets pushed way to the back as I slide the board with the sausage into the OBS.
So how did it work? The Auber PID and fan kept temps nice and even.
1 hour of 140 deg for drying, 1 hour of 160 deg w/ Hickory smoke, 170 deg w/ 2 more hours of smoke, then continued at 170.
Once the sausage got to 150 (10 hours), it didn't get any hotter for over the next 1.5 hrs. So I pushed the PID to 180, and hit 155 on the Maverick probe in about 1.5 hours. My Thermopen (man they are nice, but spendy) said 155 at the top, 157 at the bottom of the casing, and about 152 in the middle. So the bottom only got 2 deg hotter than the top.
Yep, we all like pics, so here ya go.


Lesson learned, I can't do 2.5" sausage with 170 deg. Need 175 or 180. Maybe I'll use the 1 lb casings next time so I don't need to spend 10 hours smoking them.
drano