Franklin BBQ Pits - How Our Pits are designed and why

hey there I'm Aaron Franklin from Austin Texas I work at a little place called Franklin Barbecue and I also happen to do barbecue pits this is the Franklin Barbecue Pit we've been building them for a number of years now been working on the design for years been prototyping for hundreds and hundreds of models but alas here we are and I want to talk about why it's designed the way it's designed and why it Cooks the way it Cooks so let's get started so the Franklin Barbecue Pit is purely a result of me cooking and it's built from the inside out and it's designed with airflow in mind and it's really you know this thing is meant to cook the perfect brisket to get the bark just right to render the fats just right so I want to talk about why that works like this first thing is you may notice on the door it says Franklin that's because well I thought it would look cool and then these little things down here these are the air vents and this is kind of designed like an internal combustion engine you've got an intake and you've got an exhaust well the exhaust is obviously the Smoke Stack therefore this is the intake and this was really in the design process this was the one thing that took longer than anything else I can't even count how many doors I've made and cut different size holes different shapes all the different stuff and the idea behind it is is that this thing is designed to burn super duper clean you'll notice there's no damper on it that's because I don't want you to build a dirty fire a fire needs air and it needs the proper amount of air so if you got a fire in here these vents allow the proper amount of air that always pulls you'll see a properly designed Barbecue Pit has a good Smoke Stack that creates a vacuum so you can't push air on a fire you have to pull it and that's what these holes do so say you've got a fire inside this Firebox the air is coming in here it's hitting the coals it's hitting the fire and the fire never gets dirty it always Burns clean it's always got a high combustion temperature that's where you get those good barbecue flavors that's where you get the sweetness from the wood you don't get nasty bitter flavors it's all about this airflow so you notice the back door on the Firebox is made out of 3 8. so you notice it's back trimmed there's a little bit of slack in these hinges and that's because each heat cycle when you build a fire this fire is going to be 600 degrees in here so this metal is going to change it's going to warp a little bit so you want a little bit of give right here so that's why the hinges are like that that's why there's a little bit of a gap because as this moves it'll tighten up and then if we go into here we've got this Spazzy little latch right here fits the curves and everything it's really meant so you can just kick it up with your foot it's easy but this little tab has a little Bend in it so that's so you can close it and it always fits smooth it doesn't fit tight you don't want them to fit tight this part moves around a whole heck of a lot so that's kind of the design for the Firebox door like I said it took a lot of rounds to get this perfectly perfect but I'm super happy with it alrighty so we've got this fire everything's working just fine so we've got the super thick door we've got a double walled back plate inside here there's no actual insulation but it is air insulated there's a concentric liner that we roll from the inside and then we roll this piece on the outside and it turns out air is a great insulator so I'm calling this semi-insulated it works real good fire swirling around it's burning clean it's doing its thing it's coming up to this point and this is one of the things that really makes a Franklin pit of Franklin pit there are other things and we'll talk about that but we've got this opening right here the Flames coming in and what's going on water pan talk about that too is we've got this warm stagnant air right here and then we've got a massive amount of airflow and if we look at the details on this the bottom of this is polished it's all rounded off everything's built like an engine it's built like a little Maserati lots of airflow lots of fluid dynamics going on in here but we've got this warm stagnant air here and we've got really hot fast moving air here so it's kind of like a bi-metallic strip you've got this thing and it's moving fast here it's moving slow here so it makes the air start to curl that's really what this is designed for it's also a shelf for a water pan we've got a water pan right here Anastasia manual too and all the wrenches and stuff good stuff but the water pan sits right here so it gets a lot of heat right here keeps moisture introduced to the Cook chamber not too much though air moves over here it starts to curl and then at this point the reason why all this stuff is designed is because we've got this vacuum right we've got all this air coming out and I think a lot of people tend to think that air or heat just moves straight across well it doesn't things just don't work that way it starts to move around and if we shut the door there's just a little bit of air gap in here and I think I really prefer an offset pit to have some stuff going on because you need a little bit of nuance in there you need to learn your tools so with the air going up out of that Chute it also tends to pull in cooler air here which more times than not depending on the climate and the weather makes the air come in and it starts to spin so it'll curl this way and this is why this is kind of The Sweet Spot on a Franklin pit everything cooks faster here you've got air moving around all this chaotic airflow smoke particulate introduced moisture from the water pan and depending on how you arrange your meat that also changes the airflow because you're putting something in there that air hits and then it has to curl around so this is all part of the cook this is all part of the Nuance too so if you've got air moving around here we've got a hard vacuum from this Smoke Stack so we use this ellipsoidal head that we press so again you don't want hard edges air just doesn't hit something because it has to figure out a way to get around it so when you polish and Port everything like an engine and when you have a good path for this air to go everything's swirling around so really between the smokestack collector the ellipsoidal head which takes a lot of work it's really not easy to build this stuff and this heat shelf and the way the Firebox works and you've got this airflow how you treat the air in there is really what gets your barbecue good it's what helps your fire burn clean it's what gets you a good bark on your briskets it's what gets you good color on everything it's what gets you those good flavors so that is essentially Franklin pit with the design of this thing you've got all this air flowing right here this is The Sweet Spot this is where things cook the fastest this is where they cook the most efficiently and that's why the thermometer is right here so as we're moving around here a couple questions we've got this little this handy dandy little Notch right here for thermometer wires if you're cooking you want to know the internal temperature wire goes out here we've also got this great height and one of the things that's always really driven me nuts is when you're you're cooking and the grates too low or it's too high this is meant to be work table height so that's kind of what determines the height the length of the legs the size of the casters all this stuff but you know the great height the shelf height the smokestack collector height that's really you know the the design for that came from trial and error so you've got this heat that comes out here and everything is measured from the geographical center of a brisket so say you've got normal sized brisket it's about four inches tall so the last one inch of the thermometer probe is two inches above the grate the grate is meant to be halfway at this point this comes out two inches and then this is settled just a little bit lower to help pull some of that heat down so it's all meant for fire it's all meant for smoke and everything is you know pretty specifically designed to be at a certain height for Optimal Performance so with all this airflow and everything going on in here smokestack Firebox the Franklin Barbecue Pit is really designed from the inside out for positive airflow and also really encourage clean fires and good flavors a few other details on the outside I'd like to talk about as well the big one that is kind of a cool thing a lot of cookers don't have these but when you're in and out of a barbecue pit all the time if this handle spins man what a cool feature and this one oh it spins it spins real nice and as we kind of go through here we're looking at the craftsmanship of these welds we've got these hinges so the hinge design is also pretty interesting there's no stop there's no counterweight there's no clunky stuff it's all kind of meant to have clean lines on the outside but there are door stops built into the hinges and if you go on the back you may also notice that it's a beautiful s-curve the way everything just kind of flows there's really the years that I've spent building and designing these things I feel like there's no detail left unturned the design stuff is so cool from the hinges to the spinning handle to exactly where the thermometer is it just pops right in there you always you know it's meant to stay loose for all these heat Cycles also so just put it put it right there but if we look at the lips oil head the relationship and all the stuff the clean lines of having a blind weld on the back the weld lines coming up here the Smoke Stack it comes unbolted when you buy it it's inside uh comes with a little wrench too so you put this thing on the inside of the smokestack is burnished so it doesn't collect any soot it's also extra tall so we have positive airflow that goes through the Firebox right there really the intention for a Franklin Barbecue Pit is to last a hundred years like this is the kind of thing you buy you pass down to your kids they pass it down to their kids it's kind of in the back of my mind I've always kind of treated Franklin Barbecue Pits like Grandma's cast iron skillet so we use really thick steel if we look at the back you know we've got a lot of heat on the back of here this back Firebox door and the outside piece is 3 8. doubled up with 5 16 on the inside so that's super thick got an 11 gauge sleeve that goes over a quarter inch concentric liner on the inside and that's what creates that one inch air gap in there so it is semi-insulated 5 16 again 5 16 and then we laser cut all the cook chamber stuff out of a flat piece of Steel and that's quarter inch and then we roll it reason why we roll it is because pipes aren't perfectly round so this another fine detail allows us to make a perfectly round cook chamber weld seams on the back to relieve tension on the door and that helps us line up this ellipsoidal head that we also have pressed and these ellipsoid heads are about 5 16. um it's scheduled so it's not a nominal thickness so the Smoke Stack collector is made out of quarter inch quarter inch flange 3 16 inch pipe this thing is super duper built to last it's not going anywhere you know really a Franklin Barbecue Pit is kind of my version of a rat rod it's meant to Patina it's meant to change over time each time you do a cook it tells a story you get a little dark spot here from a fire you get a drip right here you know when I started getting into barbecue one of the things that I really really loved and I still love it is the old pictures of like a messed up screen door at a barbecue restaurant or these old brick pits that just have layers and layers of just like stories and smoke and you know like Blood Sweat and Tears kind of thing so I think for Franklin Barbecue Pit for the steel to gradually change it maybe gets a little rust over here oil it up super no big deal but just the beauty of how something like this patinas over time I think it's just amazing but that's kind of why these things are done like this and that's also why we spend so much time on these crazy welds blind welds here cutting the threads for this doing the hinges a certain way it's really meant to be looked at so you can see the layers you're not trying to cover up anything hence the trim that's on the back and stuff like that but so it's essentially the outside of it we come down here on the legs working down the legs this is two inch schedule 40 pipe and as one would guess a Franklin Barbecue Pit is pretty gosh darn heavy so couldn't really find any casters that were strong enough so we built our own we laid the parts from the inside we designed these we cut them it's got a little flame in there stainless cast iron wheels and for the ease of moving around we put two stationary casters on the back so the front ones swivel so that way you can pick it up it's pretty heavy in the back because the Firebox so you can pick it up and it's a lot easier just to move around like that got this bolt on grate right here and it happens to get a badge and each one is individually numbered the general overview is no detail left unturned I've been thinking about this stuff for so many years I've been building them for so many years in the shop testing them at the house playing with them out in the field this thing is really I can't imagine anyone else that's put more legwork and time into design and function you know and to top it all off the Franklin Barbecue Pits are handmade here in America with All-American steel boom

Channel: BBQwithFranklin

Views: 259,247

Keywords: Bbq with franklin, BBQ, franklinbbq, aaronfranklin

Id: N9MaAIrtdJE

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023