Pork for the Ignorant Masses

I got a couple of comments about the pig roaster Val and his father threw together. People are suggesting improvements.

Ordinarily, I love trying to tweak things. But in this case, I'd hesitate. The pig was a hundred percent perfect. I don't know how it could have been any better. If I were going to change things, instead of changing the way the setup cooks, I'd try to make it more reliable.

We had a number of little problems. For one thing, you have to have the spit very level, or the pig migrates to the low side of the box. We fixed that by shimming the caja china, which we used as the base of the cooker. A simple way to avoid this would be to use something similar to a weightlifting collar in the inside of the low side, to butt against the "bearing" (gap between two pieces of steel tube) and prevent the spit from sliding further. We also had problems with the pulley on the motor getting out of alignment with the pulley on the spit. When that happens, the belt eventually comes off the spit pulley. Val's dad made the motor bracket with a single wingnut to keep it from twisting out of alignment, and it's not enough. We fixed it by adding a C-clamp. It would be even better if we had direct drive with no belt, but you need a very slow motor for that. It looks like the setup we had turned at around 1.5 RPM, with about a four-to-one reduction, so we'd need a motor at least four times as slow.

It ought to be possible to make a pig cooker that comes apart into a few parts that take up very little room. I guess they're already available; I've seen some stuff on the web. If you made one yourself, what would you need?

1. Two stable supports for the spit, with a motor bracket on one.
2. A slow motor with a small pulley on the shaft.
3. Spit with a big pulley on the end.
4. Something to hold a tray of charcoal about a foot and a half below the pig.

You could also add a couple of sheets of metal to stand parallel to the pig, to deflect the heat away from observers, but I don't think they'd make the device work better. We had something like that, and I don't think it helped. But it made standing near the pig more comfortable.

I'm looking at stuff they sell on the web, and truthfully, it seems lame to me. The motors are oversized, and it's all very expensive. The cheapest decent-looking rotisserie on Google Shopping is $650, and it's limited to 85 pounds. I think you could beat that price by about $500 and make something considerably better.

The motor Val used is similar to this Dayton motor sold by Grainger, and it turned a 50-pound pig with maybe 8 pounds of stuffing, plus wire mesh and whatever brine the pig soaked up. It never missed a beat. So I don't see any reason to buy a huge enclosed motor. I guess it would last longer, but these things are dirt cheap, and you don't use one every day.

Truthfully, I think you could make a couple of small steel brackets suitable for clamping to sawhorses. That would be the simplest solution. Cook your pig, break the sawhorses down, store the motor and brackets in a shoebox. Why not? You could use bicycle sprockets and a chain. Adjust the tension by sliding the brackets when you clamp them to the sawhorses. Super easy. You'd have to keep the sawhorses from getting hot enough to burn, but I don't think that would be hard.

As for the spit, I'm pretty sure Val's is a galvanized fence post. A little zinc on your food won't hurt you. And fumes aren't a problem. Five bucks at Home Depot.

Googling, I see that some people use chicken wire to hold their pigs. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't want something that could pop as easily as chicken wire, and I wouldn't want that much wire contacting the pig. Val used some sort of mesh that has rectangular openings about 3" long and 1.5" wide. It's about the same gauge as barbed wire. Strong enough to support, but flexible enough to be worked with pliers. We used monel fishing wire to fasten the mesh to the Tapcon screws.

Maybe I should throw a cooker together, just for my readers. If the sawhorse idea works, it should be a one or two-day job, and it should cost maybe 50 or 75 bucks. That would be fantastic, and even people who aren't great with tools could copy it. I don't want to cook a pig right away, but I could test it with weights. If it will turn 75 pounds of cast iron, it ought to turn a pig.

Let's see.

1. Sawhorse brackets
2. Two by fours
3. Two bike sprockets
4. Cheap motor
5. Charcoal pan, on some sort of legs.
6. Fence post

I'd love to weld together some brackets to hold the motor and bearings, but it would be better if I could come up with something usable as-is, from a hardware store. If I could pull that off, I'd be a hero to millions.

I'll fart around with the design and see if it's worth fooling with.

Also, Merry Christmas.