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I made my first attempt at cutting up wood chunks from firewood for smoking. It was way too much work, but hopefully the end result will be worth it. Next time I'll use a chop saw me thinks. I'm not sure if I got the size right, but I gathered about 2" cubed is about right from the internets. These are probably more like 1.5" or so. The wood is some nice dry oak my dad cut 2 years ago.

Looks good. I usually chunk up some maple from the yard when I limb the trees, let it season for a few months in the basement or shed and go from there. Cutting seasoned oak would be tough!

Looks good.

Nice job!

Well done.

Thanks guys!

LeafMan66_67 wrote:Cutting seasoned oak would be tough!

You're damn right! I was going to do some maple and ash as well last night but my arm was tired sawing that oak!

Now the next thing will be putting it to use. I think I might try and smoke some jerky next weekend and see how it goes.

That's some great looking oak. Definitely should have some power tools to cut that stuff up! It's nice to have a variety of sizes too, up to about 3"x3" for longer cooks maybe, somewhere around there. The larger pieces will smoke longer obviously, good for low'n slow BBQ

So here's a question, how big should the chunks be corresponding to length of the smoke? I would assume the 3" cubed is an overnight, 18 hour sort of affair? 2" would be good for maybe 6-8 hours?

I also stumbled across some fresh cut maple while dumping some brush in the woods. It's anywhere between 1/2" to about 1.5". If I cut that up into about 2-3" lengths and let it dry for about a year, will that be any good for smoking?

I've used the 1.5" stuff, chunked up in 2-3" pieces ... never went much smaller than that. I dry that size for a couple of months in the house and then find that it's good to go.