By Cristin Ross
cross@jacksonvilleprogress.com
Wells High School junior Ben Carver is a genius when it comes to designing and building his shop projects.
The Wells FFA member has put his combination barbecue pit, smoker, cooker/trailer up for show and sale in the 60th annual Cherokee County Junior Livestock Show.
“I don’t know where I got the idea from, it was just something I dreamed up,” he said. “I came up with it in about a week, I guess. I didn’t have any plans, but I started with the axle and went and bought the metal and here it is.
“We like to do a lot of outdoor cooking,” Carver said of his family. “So I guess I wanted to do something for that.”
On one side his cooker/trailer features a huge double-door, barrel barbecue pit and a smoker. On the other side he included a fish fryer and three propane-fueled burners, covered by a swing-out side arm to aid the chef as he mans the cooker.
“You can boil crawfish or keep your beans heated up on the burners, while you fry your fish and smoke a brisket at the same time,” Carver explained.
An adult by-stander estimated an outdoor chef could easily cook 250 pounds of meat at a time on Carver’s project.
The whole she-bang weighs 1,790 pounds, can be pulled “with anything that’s got a ball,” Carver said, and the trailer portion of the project is painted Inferno red.
“I just liked it,” Carver said with a shrug. “When it’s not dirty and the sun catches it, it’s got a sparkle, like metal flakes, to it.”
Carver said the hardest parts of the project were getting the barbecue pit doors to fit just right, making sure the gas fitting were sealed up and getting the diamond-plate fenders square with the rest of the trailer.
“It was tough getting everything to fit just right,” he said. “It all had to be just perfectly spaced to line up.”
Carver admitted he’s putting his cooker/trailer up for sale, even though he’s torn about it.
“I don’t really want to sell it,” he said. “But hopefully it’ll go to a good home that’s really close to mine, so I can go to all the cookouts they’d have.”
Judging for the county’s shop projects begins at 8 p.m. today at the Cherokee County Stock Show & Exposition Center, on West Loop 456 in Jacksonville. Admission is free. Goats, beef cattle and swine will also be shown today.
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