From LennyK
How much strain is the rotisserie motor under ? where did you get the replacement IR burner ?
The rotisserie motor is under almost zero load. I posted earlier that I hogged out the bushing a little with a drill so there was adequate clearance to handle the relative diferences in expansion coefficients between the stainless drive shaft and bronze top-hat bushing. That helped a lot. I do take the drive shaft out every 5-10 bakes and wipe it off, but otherwise, it just works. The replacement burner was not IR, it was the underside burner. I got that from the bbqfactory on ebay. The key point here is that increasing the underside burner made a significant difference to the topside head w/o changing the IR burner.
From CB
link me to any turntable mod sites. Or was this something that you came up with. In particular, I'm really interested in the first design you were running here. I am needing something for an LBE build and don't see how I can do your bottom motor mount design. I'm using the same burner as you.
I don't know of others in the turntable area besides jgame and creation. It's been a while but I think I saw somenone in the LBE thread rotating by hand and then noticed that I have a rotisserie motor that's never been used in my grill.
You don't want my first design - it's much more complicated and problematic, especially in high temperature environments like LBE.
Have you ever noticed the convection fan in modern ovens? They have the motor located outside the hot environment and the bearing outside the heat then just expose the shaft and blade to the heat. I think that's what you want and it's similar to what I'm using. I'm not an LBE expert but I do try to follow their foolishness (and contribute my own whenever possible). I'd locate the burner more toward the back wall instead of the usual center/bottom location. The rotisserie shaft would be biased toward the front wall in keeping with the usual location of the pizza stone. I'd mount the rotisserie motor below the egg and run the SS driveshaft up to the center of the stone. Keep in mind that when the stone is rotating, the surface temperature will be roughly uniform so the flame nolonger has to be centered. Try to keep the bronze Tophat bushing out of the direct flame - but I would start with a drilled out bronze bushing. (Mine sees a lot of heat although it's not sitting at the end of a propane torch.) Put a shield around the bushing if you need to or investigate ceramic bushings. I think they are using ceramics in automotive turbochargers.
Or you could just go the easy/unmotorized way. Drill a small indentation into the center of the pizza stone and secure a bolt under the stone as a pinpoint slightly proud of the surrounding surface making rotation easy. Use a stick or spatchula to rotate the stone. (I've posted on this elsewhere.)
Hope that helps. We're fortunate to have a lot of bright minds in the forum so if someone has improvements to the above ideas, pls share.
Dave
