Couple of Wing Questions

[smokin_mo]

Hi All,
Very new to the Smokin It family and smoker cooking in general, but these forums have been an awesome guide.  I have done ribs and a couple of pork butts and am trying chicken wings for the first time tonight.
I have been using the Lazy Q as a guide along with a combination of forum posts and I am still unclear on a few things, hoping for a little help for a new guy.

1)  It seems that a number of posts recommend preheating the smoker when doing chicken wings, to help prevent them from drying out.  When preheating, do you put the wood in the box or do you just put in the empty woodbox?  Do you need the woodbox installed when preheating?

2) I brined my wings for about 2 1/2 hours then rinsed and patted them dry.  Then I put them in a Ziploc with the dry rub and shook around.  It seemed okay but not as heavily coated as when I hand pat a pork butt.  Do most people add a little oil first to make the rub stick better?

3) As I said, I tried to preheat the smoker, but of course, when I went to load 3 racks of wings, I pretty much lost all the heat.  Most people seem to smoke wings for about an hour and 30 minutes to 2 hours 30 minutes max at around 225 degrees.  Is that cooking time at full temp? For example, my smoker dropped to about 125 while I was loading and took about 30 min to get back to 225 - do I start the cook time from when I loaded or when it got back to temp?

Thanks.

 

[LarryD]

I do 10# of wings at a time...  I let them thaw in the fridge, rinse, shake dry in a colander, throw them in a large roasting pan.  I mix up my own seasoning and sprinkle it all over the wings and then stir and repeat until I'm happy with the coating.

For the smoker I make sure I have an empty grease pan (they produce a LOT of waste), bottom of smoker and top of wood box foiled (with drain hole punched), and wood loaded.  This last time I used a mix of pecan and apple... about 6 oz.  (I like a heavy smoke flavor.)  For other smokes I usually use ~2 oz chunks.  For wings I use my hatchet to split the chunks into halves or thirds since the smoke time is so short.  I do NOT put any water in the smoker for wings.

I do NOT preheat my #2. 

I put the rails as high as they'll go in the smoker.  I load 4 standard racks with an even disbursement of the wings and put the racks as high up as they can each go.  I then close the smoker, set it to 225, and let it go for 90-100 minutes.  I'm perfectly fine with the skin quality as-is when I take them out, but you can throw them into an oven preheated to ~400 for 5 minutes if you really want the skin crispy.