Oh they were done, almost fall off the bone done....and they were probably done at 6 hours, well they were black on both sides already when I put the sauce on, well, it was kind of dark outside so they looked pretty dark from what I could tell with my meager porch light...dang it gets dark early this time of year. Anyways, next time I won't put the sauce on for so long like I did for a whole 45 minutes with no covering. What I should've probably done was put the ribs on foil at the 4 or 5 hour mark, pour some sauce, spiced rum on it and wrapped in foil for a crutch. Well my temp dial maxxes out at 250 F, I can't set it any higher than that.
As for Alton Brown, he has a salmon rub that is really tasty, just a couple ingredients if memory serves, just some black pepper, salt, and brown sugar/white sugar. There is something to be said for keeping it simple. The red western alder gives it the most amazing flavor I've ever had on smoked fish of any kind. Some guy on amazon was selling colorado alder which is not the same (I think it's officially called white alder if memory serves). The red western alder is better and it likes to grow near ocean moisture like on the West coast, so I had to order it from just smoked salmon, they were some furniture shop leftovers cut to nice small rectangles. Pretty expensive to have a bag of wood shipped across country but my smoker is very efficient and doesn't need very much wood to give a good strong smoke flavor, just a tiny piece really. I think $25 got me a lifetime supply of the stuff considering I don't have salmon but once a month. I haven't had any problems with smoking in this tight box until last night, all my other batches were fine up until the last one, so I think I may have either had the temp set too high, the ribs in a hot spot, or just plain cooked the sauce too long.