Chimney from well casing

Oil-well casing makes a good chimney for a coal- or wood-burning heater in a garage, barn, or workshop. This one is 15 1/2 ft tall and sits on a concrete block. The length of the piece of casing welded to the side is determined by how far the stove is from the inside wall, and how close to the building you can erect the pipe. It is stabilized by a bracket bolted to the chimney and to a piece of strap iron attached to the building. Total cost, installed, was about $250. This compares to $450 for parts alone if I had purchased the pipe and fittings to run a new chimney through the roof.

Sponsorship for this essay is provided by wood-burning stove suppliers.

Sharpening saw chains is worth the effort

During my many years of burning firewood, I’ve bought a variety of sharpening instruments - files, gauges, and even an attachment for my old Dremel grinder. They were all pretty slow and - for me - too time-consuming and tedious. Finally I chucked all of it and began taking my chains to a shop, keeping on hand enough extra chains to keep me going.

With slim hope that it would help, I ordered a little sharpener (shown above) from Harbor Freight tools. It cost less than $40 and paid for itself quickly, compared to shop sharpening prices - now about $4 per chain in my part of the world.

It isn’t difficult to set up once you know your chain’s size and angles, and the sharpening process goes fairly quickly.

Don’t mistake this thing for a quality tool. It’s mostly plastic and probably the angles aren’t exact, and I don’t expect it to last a lifetime. Still, this is an affordable way to avoid commercial sharpening prices.

Sponsorship for this essay is provided by wood-burning stove suppliers.

Loader hook makes tractor more versatile

The hook that’s welded to the back of the bucket on my front-end loader increases my tractor’s versatility and my ability to lift all sorts of unhandy items with it. Why the loader didn’t come from the factory that way is a mystery. Fact is, I never knew there was any need for such a hook, not until my son needed me to move something for him and he knew exactly how to make it happen. He welded the hook to the bucket and showed me how to use it.

I doubt he invented this, but I also doubt that its use is very widespread; correct me if you know differently. I think most folks use the boom pole, which is okay if you don’t have a loader. But I have both and I know that a driver can maneuver the front end of a tractor a lot better than the boom.

To illustrate how precise you can be with a chain from the bucket, I present photos of the way I put the wood rack on my flatbed trailer - the rack I built to haul firewood. Getting that heavy rack into a position from which the side stakes will drop straight down into the holes on the trailer is no easy skate, not unless you lift it with a chain from a ring at the rack’s center of balance.

Among the most frequent uses I make of this front-loader hook is the snaking of logs to be cut for firewood with grabber tongs. Often you can hitch onto a log without dismounting from the tractor, and once you get the end of the log off the ground just a little bit you can pull a surprising piece of tree with a little tractor like mine.

Sponsorship for this essay is provided by wood-burning stove suppliers.

Chimney cleaning

This photo shows the arduous and terrifying trip I made annually for about 40 years. The only thing that inspired me was the even more terrifying thought that if I neglected to do it the house might catch fire.

If someone didn’t go up there and knock down the soot and creosote, a hot fire in the wood burner could ignite the chimney. That, in itself, wouldn’t hurt. What hurts would be if there’s a crack in the chimney inside a wall or attic where escaping flames could ignite whatever is nearby. (In recent years, stainless chimney liners are often required, and even if they aren’t, it’s a good hedge toward safety.)

Wood-burner people should definitely attend to this chore at least once every year.

The tool I began with is pretty simple, but not so efficient - it was a burlap bag on a rope, filled with straw or rags and weighted with rocks. This eventually morphed into the 8-inch round brush on 20-foot, five-section fiber rod.

Other things that need an annual check are the items on the ground in the photo: the chimney cap and the interior stove pipe, both of which need to be cleaned or replaced if rusty.

I am not at peace with high places, which is why I made a couple tie-downs for the top ladder. One is a chain to the bottom rung so it will never (again) slip outward (and give me one of the scariest rides of my life), anchored to the house with a chain to an eye-hook. The other is a bungee strap from the top step anchoring it to the chimney.

If you have to hire someone to do this for you, here are some things to nail down before they get out of their truck. 1 - Are they local, bonded, and insured? 2 - Does their price include removal, cleaning, and reinstallation of the stove pipe? 3 - Do they go to the roof or do they push a brush up from the bottom? (This, in my opinion, is an ineffective method. It is one by which there can be no inspection of the chimney cap - and may even loosen or damage the cap.) 4 - Do they take with them all soot, creosote, dirt and residue? 5 - Will they install a new chimney cap if needed, and if so at what charge? 6) Might they make any additional charges for anything?

Final advice. There are some real slugs working the chimney-cleaning business. Until you really get to know them and their work, watch everything they do and ask all the questions you can think of.

Sponsorship for this essay is provided by wood-burning stove suppliers.

Low-heat firewood

We’ve been burning firewood for decades, and for decades the problems associated with heat during cool (not cold) weather have dogged me. Trouble is, you get a fire hot enough to ignite normal, seasoned hardwood, and you get a fire so hot that it will have you opening windows and doors or drive you out of the house. With normal firewood, it’s all or nothing.

On the other end of the stick, if you use pine - which will ignite and burn at a lower temperature - you also get a chimney full of creosote because of the pitch in the pine wood.

After all these years I finally learned that I can maintain a lower temperature safely by using logs like the one in the picture at the top. It’s old (2 or 3 years) soft maple, though likely other old softwoods would also work. These logs ignite quickly and can hold a long, slow fire without causing a clogged, fire-prone chimney.

Sponsorship for this essay is provided by wood-burning stove suppliers.