I’d like to say that, as a journalist, I have an uncanny ability to find and root out the best stories. But in this case, I was on Facebook Marketplace looking for something else and saw something I’d never seen before. The algorithm knows me, I guess.

I immediately called the guy who was selling this amazing thing and asked him all sorts of questions. What follows has been edited for brevity and clarity. (I’ve also annotated our conversation with the help of Dana Hanson, the extension meat specialist at NC State University and the person who puts on State’s annual Barbecue Camp.) You can also listen to this story on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

North Carolina Rabbit Hole:
Can you tell me about yourself?

Tyius McKinney:
I’m Tyius McKinney, born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, went to Southern Guilford High School. I have a family. I live a little bit south now in a town called Randleman. I’m in IT. I was a Navy veteran, got out like four years ago at this point.

Rabbit Hole:
Tell me about your Facebook marketplace listing that went up a couple of days ago.

McKinney:
Yeah, sure. It's just a vertical file cabinet that I turned into a smoker.

Originally, I was looking at some of the vertical smokers that they have for sale. One: they cost a lot more. Two: A lot of them were not in stock. So I was like, hey, I want a vertical smoker. Let me see what else I can find. And getting on YouTube, going through some forums, reading and stuff, I saw that people had turned file cabinets into smokers.

And I'm like, that seems incredibly easy. I feel like I can get that done, no problem. And that's what it turned into. A file cabinet smoker.

NOTE: At this point, you might be wondering the same thing I was: Is this something that’s new to me, or new to everybody? It turns out that file cabinet smokers have been around for a while, and they’re not necessarily a Southern thing. “if you call yourself a Buffalo Bills fan, it’s maybe a rite of passage to have a file cabinet smoker in the parking lot,” Dana Hanson tells me.

Googling “file cabinet smoker” will give you plenty of how-tos and breathless demonstrations, along with plenty of humblebrags. At least one student has built a file cabinet smoker as a class project. Google Trends shows that something happened in June of 2015 that shot their awareness into the stratosphere, although the reaction to them online seems to show that most people have never seen or encountered them. Hanson hasn’t seen many himself, but he remembers the first time he gazed upon a file cabinet smoker. “My initial response was: That's pretty cool,” he says.

Rabbit Hole:
I have many questions because I have not delved into the file cabinet smoker section of Reddit. What sorts of things would this sort of a thing be good for? Like, what were you cooking in it?

McKinney:
Vertical smokers are able to hold more food, because normally the firebox will be off to the side or the firebox is at the bottom, and that's how you can control how much smoke and heat is gonna go up on it. And then you just have multiple layers that are closer or farther from the heat. You can hold a lot more food. That one, I was able to cook like six pork butts on it, no problem. I had I still had space left.

I just don't cook for that many people that often. I'm not like a professional cooker or anything. I cook in my backyard. But I wanted to see like what the vertical smoker was like. It was super easy to maintain the heat, super easy to maintain the fire in it.

So the first thing I did was find a fireproof file cabinet on Facebook Marketplace. I think I got it for like $30 from somebody. Went and met them in a McDonald's parking lot. Then after that, I went to Harbor Freight and I got some wheels to go on the bottom. I spaced them out so that it wouldn't tip over or anything and I could move it around a pretty bit easy. Put those in there. Then I went to Lowe's and I got some grates that they had. I'm pretty sure they're like stainless steel grates. I'm trying to think what I used to cut it out the bottom. Did I use a reciprocating saw? I might have. So I cut out the bottom, replaced it with the grill grates, and then I just tack welded them on the sides. And then I realized, well, you know, maybe I want to make them removable, so I cut those welds off.

And so now that they're removable and you just put the food on them, they don't move around at all, but you can take them out and clean them if you need to. Then I put a chimney on the side of it so the smoke had a way to go through all the food. And I put some temperature gauges on the top two drawers.

Rabbit Hole:
What are you, an engineer? Do you do this stuff in your day job?

McKinney:
No sir. I just like to mess with stuff. I work on cars, but that's really the only engineering I do. I'm more of a mechanic than an engineer, honestly.

Rabbit Hole:
So you're not like somebody who would know exactly how to engineer something like this, but you can put something together.

McKinney:
In a nutshell, that's exactly it. I saw a problem. I'm like, hey, I feel like I could do this and then I watched a couple of videos on YouTube, looked at some people on smoking meat Reddit. I'm like: That might work. That seems pretty easy. And then once I tried it, I'm like: This was insanely easy. It took me maybe a couple of hours to put it all together. Like, five hours.

And so when I first got it, I set a big fire in it. I wanted to make sure all the paint on the inside was gone. You don't want those toxins in your food.

NOTE: Obviously, file cabinets were not engineered to be smokers, which means they might contain some stuff that you don’t want in your food. “The biggest thing I would be concerned with are the materials,” says Hanson. “I would venture a guess that some of those cabinets are made with galvanized steel, which is a concern. High temperature, galvanized steel, and food do not mix. At high enough temperatures, there could can be some toxicity issues with that galvanized being volatilized.

“Same thing with the paint. Certainly paint is not considered safe in any fashion. So I would use caution. Again you're dealing with something that wasn't designed to be food safe. The standard materials in in barbecue grills are non-galvanized steel and, in some cases, cast iron and ceramic. Stainless steel is probably the material of choice because it’s able to be cleaned.”

Shorter version: We’re not endorsing the safety of any food that comes from a file cabinet smoker! But we’re also not saying that a lot of people don’t think they’re cool.

Rabbit Hole:
When you used it to cook for people, what was their reaction when you wheeled that thing out?

McKinney:
If you're ever gonna be smoking anything, it takes a while. So the people didn't know that's what I was gonna be cooking on. And so then they got there, they're like, what's in your driveway? And I'm like: That's a smoker I'm using. And they're like: That's a file cabinet. And I'm like: No, it's a smoker I made out of a file cabinet. And I showed them and they're like: No way. And then they ate it and it tastes like normal barbecue and they're like: That's actually insane.

Rabbit Hole:
Is there anything else like this in your personal collection? Or is everything else like very normal?

McKinney:
I mean, I make a tool every now and then, like you gotta grind off a wrench so that you can get into a hard part or something like that. But other than that, no.

It really and truly came down to money. I looked at the smokers. Unless you go the Oklahoma Joe route, if you go like a professional vertical smoker route, they're talking about like three or four thousand dollars. I'm like, yeah, I'm not spending that on some metal. We can figure this out another way. And that's where it came from. It was just pure ingenuity because I refused to pay the prices that they wanted for a professional vertical smoker.

I've had it for about a year and a half. I just don't really need it anymore. I found out I don't need a vertical smoker. It can hold a lot of food, honestly, and I just don't use it as much. I use my offset smoker more.

NOTE: Is an expensive smoker any better than, say, a file cabinet? It depends on how much you want to cook, and what kind of a show you want to put on, says Hanson. “You can go to any Home Depot or Lowe’s—not to plug either one of them, but those types of home stores have them at a very reasonable price. Or you can spend In excess of $10,000 for a pit smoker.” Some pellet grills don’t require much oversight at all. Others require constant attention. “At the top end is an offset, reverse-flow, stick-burning tank smoker. You're managing the firebox for that 10- to 12-hour cook. You're stoking the fire. You're adding wood every 20 to 30 minutes. You’re Invested for the whole time.” Which one’s the best? It depends on your need. “They all produce barbecue at the end of the day,” Hanson says. Even the smokers that you make yourself.

Rabbit Hole:
You're selling it for like a hundred dollars.

McKinney:
It cost a hundred fifty dollars to make it.

Rabbit Hole:
But you also say you would trade it for a broken chainsaw.

McKinney:
Yeah. Chainsaws are expensive number one. But if you can get like a old school steel Husqvarna chainsaw, a beefy chainsaw for like two hundred dollars that's broken? You get it fixed, you got like a six hundred dollar chainsaw that'll last you the rest of your life.

Rabbit Hole:
You're willing to barter.

McKinney:
A hundred percent. I'm definitely a barterer. I'd rather barter than money, to be honest with you. I just think it's fun. I enjoy seeing what people got and I like seeing other people's junk that maybe I can make something useful to me.

Rabbit Hole:
How much how much interest have you gotten in this so far?

McKinney:
It's really been a lot of people like: Hey, that looks amazing. Can you tell me more about it? I'm not really trying to buy it, but that's just amazing. I've never seen anything like that. I've had a couple of people message me like: Hey, I'm trying to buy it. When can I meet up? And then you message them back and they don't say anything. So I mean, that's what goes with Facebook Marketplace. Well, it's only been five days, so we'll see.

NOTE: A day after our conversation, the listing came down. Tyius texted me to say that one of his friends saw he was selling it and asked if he could have it instead.

Rabbit Hole:
It seems like a unique item, although it sounds like there are other people out there that have done it.

McKinney:
Yeah, I don't think a lot of people have seen it. A lot of people don’t even know about it to be honest. I think smoking meat is a niche community. Once you get into it, like you really get into it. I am learning because I am new to it, and I very much enjoy it. I say if you have never smoked meat or barbecued, get into it. It's a great hobby, great way to meet people, great way to talk to people.

I am sort of mechanically inclined, but you can do it too. I promise you, if you know some wrenches, or have used the reciprocating saw before, you can do this too.