Collegiate Times

There is a locomotive in the Prices Fork parking lot.

Modest plumes of smoke pour forth from its stack, but those nearby aren't pinching their noses. In fact, the smoke is drawing observers - the smell is magnetic. Their anxious, gaping mouths would be well-served by bibs.

Nick Cardwell fondly remembers such scenes with the mobile barbecue smoker he and friend Andrew Duggleby designed and built.

"It's like a Pied Piper effect," he said.

Cardwell, a mechanical engineering graduate student, grew tired of laborious tailgates after Virginia Tech's 2004 football season. He would transport and operate four grills attempting to feed his many friends. Often times the waiting line for grill space sent his fellow fans into the stands with growling stomachs.

"What I need," Cardwell had thought, "is something that I can cook for a lot of people on."

Duggleby, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. graduate who now works at Texas A&M University, also liked the idea and worked alongside Cardwell.

Their nearly 2,000 pound brainchild is the nucleus of their tailgate group, "The Hokie Smokes" and could likely survive a nuclear attack - its thinnest component has quarter-inch-thick walls.

The smoker is composed almost entirely of steel retrieved from a salvage yard in Wytheville, Va. The main cylinder and vertical stack are sections of old oil field pipes. The recovered Michelin tires spin on a straight rear axle taken from a wrecked van.  When all the materials were loaded into his Chevrolet half-ton pickup, Cardwell recalls the truck bed flattening the rear shocks onto their bump stops.

Cardwell and Duggleby worked tirelessly on the project. With the help of a professional welder, they finished in only one month, just in time for the 2005 football season's kickoff. The only problem they encountered was opening the smoker.

Cardwell asked me to lift the lid, and in doing so, I felt like pre-spinach Popeye. But apparently that was nothing compared to the 300 pound original.

"You'd about bust a gut," Cardwell said.

His simple solution was welding on a counterweight fashioned from extra metal scraps.  

The mechanics of the smoker are quite elementary. First, wood is loaded into the firebox. Cardwell cuts and hauls downed apple and hickory trees from acquaintances' properties outside of town. An adjustable draft opening in the firebox controls the levels of heat and smoke that enter the main cylinder. The escape of heat and smoke is then mediated by a butterfly valve within the vertical stack.

The wood smolders, though; it does not blaze. Subsequently, Cardwell is a patient chef. With the internal temperature usually lingering around 200 degrees, the smoker's cook times can range anywhere from eight to twenty-two hours depending upon the menu.

"The key is to get that smoky flavor," Cardwell said, "and you cook it so slow that it doesn't get tough."

Like a rabbit out of a hat, Cardwell will smoothly pull the bones from a pork shoulder to demonstrate its tenderness.

"It's like it's in butter," he said.

"Grilling and smoking is a healthy way to cook," added Cardwell's younger brother Wes, a mechanical engineering senior at Virginia Tech. The smoking process naturally trims the gristly, unwanted fat from the meat.

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