Furter Burner Cooks The Wieners Just So

31 Comments

Sometimes you’re hungry for two sausages, and not a sausage more. [Wesley] designed his Furter Burner to handle precisely these situations, and it looks to cook up a pair of wieners a treat. (Video, embedded below.)

The process starts with a couple of wooden stunt wieners, and some foam board, with which [Wesley] roughs out a design. From there, a CAD design is drawn up and parts routed out of compressed board to troubleshoot the assembly further. Later moving on to a plywood version, having a wooden prototype quickly reveals plenty of things to improve, from adding handles to the grill surface to air holes to allow combustion.

The design goes through a couple of further iterations in metal before completion. The final result is impressive—resulting in a twin-wiener cooker that burns coals, complete with skewers for easy sausage handling and bearing [Wesley’s] own logo.

The video shows off the benefits of the iterative design process. It also demonstrates why it often makes sense to rough out designs in cheaper materials before going to the heavy stuff, particularly in a case like [Wesley]’s where the metal parts can only be cut off-site. Refining the design in-house first saves a lot of mucking around.

We’ve seen [Wesley]’s work before, too – like this impressive workshop storage solution.

31 thoughts on “Furter Burner Cooks The Wieners Just So”

  1. Two nails and an AC cord. “Makes a perfect hot dog cooker”. It was in the book from the chikdren’s library fifty years ago.

    Or buiod a solar cooker, that was in a book, but maybe not from the library.

    Report comment
    Reply

      1. Built a two nails cooker from a 1940’s boy scout book. My younger brother was 15 mos. younger than me. I was about 11 years old at the time. plugged it in to make sure the plywood wouldn’t catch fire. (no hot dog on the nails.) Looked down and my brother was touching the nails to see if they were getting hot. Before i could stop him I heard “they’re not getting hhhhhhhooooottttttttttttttt!”. He thought the nails would get hot. Got the shock of his life! Unit cooked the dogs pretty good though. In the 80’s they sold a home version that made six dogs at a time. They didn’t sell for very long.

        Report comment
        Reply

    3. There was a “young experimenter’s” book in our public library, printed in the 1950’s, that would curl the hair of any reasonably intelligent person reading it today.

      One experiment that I remember was especially “shocking”, dangerous on multiple fronts:

      Carbon-arc light from zinc oxide battery carbon electrodes. Used a “salt-water rheostat” (120 VAC in salt water, add salt to increase conductivity)

      So, how did our 1950’s counterparts ever survive? Or, perhaps all but the best and brightest (or at least the most careful/timid) were weeded out?

      Report comment
      Reply

      1. Yeah, I did that carbon-arc light when I was about 12. The salt-water rheostat was less stupid than it sounds. It did indeed dramatically increase the electrocution hazard if it spilled, but it also served as a really effective current limiter. The book that I was following included a design that would have been really hard to spill. I didn’t have any of that stuff, so I just grabbed a used margarine tub and rammed two nails through the lid. Pretty stupid, but it worked very well, and I survived.

        The far more dangerous hazard was much less obvious.

        The arc lamp itself could cast *heavy* shadows in noontime sun, and was far too bright to look at directly. Since keeping the arc struck required carefully staring at the point where all the light was being generated, I decided that several pairs of really dark sunglasses would dim things down enough.

        I was right, in a sense. It was easy to see the actual tips of the rods, and my vision didn’t get whited out by the intense light. Sadly though, I hadn’t yet learned about UV and none of those sunglasses were uv blockers. It took a couple of weeks to recover from the snowblindness and gritty-eye symptoms. It also took a couple of weeks for the “sunburn” on my face to go away…

        As to the survival of our more curious ancestors, I’d hazard a guess that it’s simple statistical odds, combined with perception.

        Any given “insane experiment” wasn’t actually that likely to seriously injure someone. Some of the really hazardous one might be 1:10,000 risk of significant harm. Most of them were less than 1:1,000,000….

        These risks would have been greater if the general population was compelled to participate, but most of the people with the curiosity and interest would already have relevant experience doing other similar things. That arc light, for example, wasn’t the easiest or first-listed experiment of its kind in the book I read. The mercury vapor lamp (using a venturi vacuum generator connected to the sink and an automotive spark coil) was much easier to set up, and had a much lower risk of injury (brief exposure to mercury aside, and ignoring the consequences of long-term mercury pollution of the sewer system).

        At those risk levels, the ambient hazard of just living in that time and place would be the dominant factor, meaning that crazy kid experimenters did not die at a substantially greater rate than the baseline population. And thus, crazy kids survived their mistakes, and were able to successfully grow up into engineers whose projects, if they failed, would have MUCH bigger consequences :)

        Report comment
        Reply

      2. Ever had Sabrett frankfurters? They can be found in the eastern USA and other places like Las Vegas. But despite a fairly high concentration of ex-Eastereners in the Pacific Northwest, I can’t find anywhere in this corner of the nation that has them.

        Report comment
        Reply

    6. typical hot dogs are caseless. they’re cooked in a plastic case at the factory that is removed before packaging. proper animal casings are expensive and a bit fiddly to manufacture. if you’re smoking them you can use a cellulose casing, again it’s not edible so you remove it before serving.
      I’m not sure if there is anything that gross about emulsifications. Salad dressing, gravy, and cake batter are all these things too.
      Now for those folks that like a big bloody steak or a side of ribs, I think that’s a bit weird. Having myself been to a slaughter house on several occasions. The smell before you even walk inside should make you run. Hot dog factors smell about the same as a baby food factory to my nose, a bit weird and unpleasant but doesn’t reek quite like a slaughter house.

      Report comment
      Reply

      3. “I’m not sure if there is anything that gross about emulsifications.”

        The trimmings didn’t look all that appealing to me; though not as unappealing as the “mechanically separated” meat that goes into the cheapest snags and stuff like baloney:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnaYwW7Pl6c

        I remember a documentary on the British chain Tesco where the camera crew ventured to one of its sausage suppliers. They started their tour at the end of the production line and worked backwards, but the factory representative ended the tour before they could film the animal content going into the hopper. He was frank in explaining that the public wouldn’t find it appealing.

        I grew up in a suburb several kilometers downhill of an abattoir abandoned for about 30 years now. A few times a year, typically on a hot summers day when the breeze was gentle and blowing in the right direction, the whole neighborhood got ponged out. Everyone had to keep their windows wide open into the early evening after the miasma has passed to ventilate their houses. A really unique smell, not quite comparable to anything else.

        Report comment
        Reply

        1. I bough a pickled sausage from a gas station and the main ingredient was “beef lips”. Which I guess isn’t that surprising because pork lips are a regional treat in parts of the US.
          The main cause of smell is when the food waste isn’t dealt with effectively. If it’s refrigerated on a truck when it arrives and immediately tossed into a hopper. there shouldn’t be a problem. if any bits are discarded they should be placed in a sealed container, but ultimately there should be almost no waste because they’re just throwing away money then, even the fat could be turned into a product and sold.
          I’m guessing your particular establishment just threw all the fat and membrane in a bin instead of sealing it up in a drum or passing it on to a pet food maker.
          Of course, maybe don’t build your suburb around a meat packer that has probably been there for ages. I can tell you that living in a city with a paper mill is no treat either.

          Report comment
          Reply

  5. Yeah I had a friend that was really into sausages and pepperoni. He died of colon cancer. It was really fast, one day he was healthy and the next he was in hospice care, and then he was gone.

    Report comment
    Reply

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.