Making a smoker from a filing cabinet

I've meant to do this for years. The idea is you light a small fire of hardwood in the bottom drawer, drill holes for the smoke to penetrate in the drawer(s) above plus a few ventilation holes top and bottom and ta-dah! Smoker for bacon, ham, sausages, cheese, tofu, garlic, eggs- anything you fancy.
I've even acquired a dishwasher and a filing cabinet in the past and then got rid of them because I hadn't got round to it.

I then (much to my colleagues amusement) took home a two drawer filing cabinet that didn't lock anymore. It was metal but modern and not especially robust. I think we killed it.

So, on a mission now, we found an old, solid-looking 4 drawer cabinet for £9 not too far away, so Smoker Number 2...

I don't know what the filing cabinet is coated with but I'm pretty sure it's not designed to be food safe, so we started sanding it off.

Well. That was going to take forever. And there are lots of little corners  couldn't get into with an electric sander and as that was slow going, sanding by hand wasn't going to happen. Plan B. Light a hot fire in the bottom drawer and burn off anything nasty.

We drilled holes in the top 3 drawers, ventilation holes in the front of the bottom drawer and top of the cabinet frame.

Drilling pilot holes and then larger holes in the drawer we started sanding

Son appeared at the sound of power tools and helped drill ventilation holes

We removed any plastic bits (the rollers are metal but there are plastic label holders and covers on the edges of the drawers) and then we lit a fire of scrap wood in the bottom.

We took off these label holders

Hopefully any chemicals have now offgassed and it's ready to go...