Tuesday night – Keeping the home fires burning

spent a good part of my after work time working to repair our wood-stove.. Our wood-stove is our main heat.. so having it out of commission is not ok this time of year. It’s an old soapstone hearthstone Mansfield. It’s a wonderful stove. It has an fancy ‘afterburner’ system that vents the output of the firebox through 4 perforated steel pipes . where any remaining combustibles are burned. It’s what makes it a very clean stove..

Unfortunately, those air-tubes take a lot of beating. thy tend to buckle and fail. Last time we replaced one it was over $1000. this time a new set was going to be over $400 !!>. No way.. so I set to work making my own. It turns out the air tubes were 18.5″ stainless steel with a bunch of drilled holes. Diane went to Queen city steel for me and bought 8′ of 3/4; schedule 40 type 309 stainless welded tubing.. Schedule 40 3/4 has an OD of 1.02″… the fittings in the stoves exhaust manifold are exactly 1″, so I had to taper all four tubes down to that size. It was tough getting these things to fit. The stove exhaust manifold has warped with heat.. and everything is kind of frozen together.. With some coercion.. things came apart.. OK.. I then drilled 140 holes of different sizes .. drilling stainless is never fun.. but it all came out ok. Each tube had progressively bigger holes.. then had to fix the stuff into the frame with stainless hardware. It may not sound hard.. but I’m covered with grease, ashes and metals splinters.. but the darn thing is back together and ready to go !

here re the old tubes.. all bent and oxidized