Yoder Smokers Community Forum

Hello all,

I am very new to the smoking game, for the past 2 years have been smoking on a weber smokey mountain grill. Literally last week my father surprises me by sending me a ys640 competition model smoker. Going to be honest a little intimidated by it, first off its enormous and way more complex than my little weber bbq. Planning on finally getting it fired up soon, was wondering if anyone has any recs or words of wisdom for my first initial "burn off". Thanks, looking forward to being part of this community and learning a lot from all of you

These things are actually almost as simple as an oven. The key is to not over think. Let the pit do the work. They come with a preset temp of 350... let the steel warm up to temp and then back it off to your desire temp. In the beginning I would try to change the temp too often of hit the desired temp on the fly. In effect trying to over think. Honestly all it will do is confuse the pits brain. Keep the unit , burn grate and thermocoupler clean and the problems will be few and far between. Trust the pit, no reason to peek on long slow cooks...once again just confuses the pit and makes it adjust and overwork. On high heat cooks splatter is the biggest obstacle.

If there is a malfunction call customer service. Getting ideas to problems here on this site is nice but in the end there are more experts just a phone call away and a solution to most problems is attained faster.

Have fun!!

thanks for the info