Category: wood

I started going through the massive amount of oak that was dropped in my driveway last Winter. It’s fun and fast.

Everything is massive with this oak. I excised some of the cool knots, not sure if I’ll ever do something with them but I figure they might be cool in some project. They need to dry a few years first so now’s not the time to think of what that could be.

Beyond the knots, we thought it’d be kind of a shame not to get a few boards out of such a special tree. It’s oak, it really stood out as a tree, it’s close to 200 years old, and we walked past it for 10 of them. So after researching possibilities, I bought a chainsaw mill with a 24″ bar and a ripping chain. The saw is a monster when fully equipped.

I haven’t taken it on its maiden ripping yet, all in due time. And now I’m dreaming of going deeper in the woods and building a cabin with lumber milled on the spot.

The wood piles are reaching their ends so it’s time to supplement them with dead (dry) stuff from the forest. We’ve gone through a lot of wood this Winter.

We don’t need another stove but we also couldn’t let this one pass. It’s our same Heartland SweetHeart we know really well from a decade of intense use, with a water tank, extra bells and whistles, a few decades newer, and for a good price. Since this is very much a key piece of our household, an upgrade even small goes a long way.

These things are heavy.

The town’s been wanting to remove an oak that is rotting and is just enough on the road that they hit it with the plow sometimes. It’s a family favorite as it’s on a dirt road we often walk on, and it’s absolutely massive. It has 3 enormous trunks, and each trunk has several branches the size of the trees I usually take. It’s next to a power line, rotted and far bigger than anything I can reasonably tackle. Let’s just say I’ve been excited when I heard about their plan to drop it. In Vermont when a town or utility needs to clear trees, the landowners get to call dibs. That was a year ago and I thought maybe they had forgotten about it. And so one day, I hear some chainsawing in the distance, and when this happens, I usually follow the noise to make sure no one is poaching my trees, and because I like to chat with neighbors. To my surprise a whole crew is there, 7 guys with heavy equipment going at the big oak. In a very typical Vermont interaction I get to meet the road foreman, and I tell him I’m definitely keeping the tree. He was aware, the information wasn’t lost in the year it took for the gears to get in motion.

I tell him he’s welcome to leave it over the bank for me to come grab, to which he responds he’ll drop it in my driveway if I prefer… Yes sir, I very much prefer not moving several tons of tree by myself :). And that’s how 31 nice big chunks of oak showed up in my driveway. I didn’t have to lift a finger, and I got to enjoy a good show (watching pros and heavy machinery at work). It’s Christmas all over again.

Some chunks are massive, and there is still a very full day’s worth of work left behind in the woods. All in all there’s probably 2 years worth of firewood. But maybe some of it is worth milling, we’ll see.

The Sweetheart is due for a rebrick after 10 years of service. Luckily I can still find parts to replace the grate.

Only half of the work is done having felled a tree, or when nature makes a choice for you as pictured bellow. Then begins the careful process of bringing it all down on the ground. It takes careful reading of limbs, tension points, and interactions, to make safe cuts. I’ve improved this skill over the years and will work through a tree with accurate anticipation of what movement a cut will yield. The delivery of the cut can also make a difference. I’m not aware of a word to describe this process of reading a tree and releasing it fully from suspension.

The heavy root system will pull the trunk back upright suddenly past a certain point.

The new stove does this cool thing when you engage the secondary combustion where the flames comes from the top rather than the logs at the bottom. It’s totally weird and I’m glad they gave us a heads up about it.

It’s not unusual in Vermont to find a crew removing trees getting in the way of one thing or another. Often times they are contracted out do clean up whole roads and will be working for several days. Often times too, they need to drive a while to get rid of the resulting chips, which to us are gold. We can use them as green matter in compost, to keep weeds from growing while giving nutrients to the soil, or at worst as fill. We never have enough and so whenever we see these crews working, we ask if we can get some chips. Sometimes it saves them time so they’re happy to, and we slip them a twenty whenever we see them. We’ve gotten 3 big loads so far this year, right in time for Spring planting. It’s a really awesome win win.

We bought another woodstove to replace the Alpiner. We keep hearing about how we could burn so much less wood with a more efficient stove, and it’s hard to understand, a log burnt is a log burnt. Why would it make more heat in another stove? Well apparently it does, and I’m not yet convinced of it, but this new stove is riddled with soapstone so at least it’s better at spreading out the release of heat over time. In the very few mornings we’ve had with it, it’s true that it was really easy to get the fire going again with just a few embers. Everything else is… well, like any other stove, we need to get acquainted with it.

The first fire, which sounds great except it’s off gassing so it stinks up the house. It does seem to be a well thought out, modern stove.

It is the first time we have a stove with a window. That aspect is really super nice, there’s nothing like the glow of a fire warming up a room.

Now I can barely move the Alpiner by myself, and the new stove (it doesn’t have a name yet), well it weights 2 to 3 times more… We had it installed thanks to tax incentives, and boy am I glad I didn’t have to move it. I don’t think I fully fathomed just how heavy it is.

It was nice to geek out with a couple of stove guys, and to make sure I wasn’t doing anything stupid since I never had someone official review my stoves and flue builds.

The Alpiner is waiting on the porch for next Spring to be moved to storage with the tractor. It’ll be useful in a cabin or other down the road. I gave it a thick coat of olive oil to prevent rust. It’ll burn off next time we fire it.

Every year, one rainy Summer day the flues and the stoves undergo a deep cleaning. A rainy day is perfect because I can’t do much else and the soot is kept down when I work on the pipes outside. This year Esther was interested, and even though it’s VERY messy work I involved her. She did great and we had a discussion about how she’d be able to maintain her stove in her cabin. Music to my ears. I like that this is a default for her, she might not even have the concept of a house without a stove.

I remove the stove pipe, to clean up the inside all the way out the roof. It’s messy even with great efforts to catch it all.

The pipes hooked to the stove are taken outside to be cleaned. Ben’s pro tip: mark the pipes with chalk where you’re separating them, it makes it easier to line them back up.

We go through all the insides of the stove and clean up accumulated ash. The first firing of the year is usually very hot because no ash is there to provide insulation.

We move very slowly to keep flying ash particles to a minimum.

Everything gets scrubbed six ways to Sunday, first with soap, then with baking soda, followed by much rinsing. We cook on the stove for most of the year, it needs it. When it’s all clean we protect the iron with stove paste, I’m not sure what it does to protect it but you can definitely feel some patches soak up more paste than other. I’d do it just because it makes the stove beautiful.

Esther has lots of very good practical question these days, she understands how a stove works now. Apparently I’ll still be the one sweeping her cabin’s chimney.

We still love burning wood with no end in sight. This stove is the most important thing in the house and I take pleasure in giving it its ritualistic pampering.

The oak went exactly where I wanted, but I misestimated its height. I should be able to patch the shed back up.

I’ve been using our newly earned trail access to get some fire wood. There’s just a ton of really good downed trees, ready to be picked. The few times we hiked up there I’d see them all and be bummed I couldn’t get to them. I feel like I’m logging in a whole new place, everything is different. the trees, the topology, being more remote, the feeling of the forest. I just walk around and start sawing where the heart tells me, it’s awesome. No real decision to be made.

How about a nice pre-felled maple?

This one was actually a bit far from the trail, but thanks to the magic of gravity, I didn’t have to carry logs the whole way.

All this awesome potential, now within reach, I can’t wait to go back.

Absolutely gorgeous, it’s a shame it will have to wait some for restoration. The sugarhouse is full of stoves now :|.

I tried a Log & Maul this time

I compared the stoves a little closer to make sure the pieces would fit between each other. I was able to confirm that this new find is an absolute score. What luck to find it, it’s going to save me time, money, and the result will be a thousand times better. And we’ll have some spare parts if we need them.

My main piece of concern was the top of the oven box, where strong fires can eat at the iron over time. You can see all the cracks and other weak areas on the top piece, but the same piece in the new stove is in perfect shape!

In that same region where fires burn hottest, the frame supporting cook lids had been eaten at. Once again, the new part is perfect.

The 2 siblings side by side, one is a model C, the other a model C-H. I cannot figure out what that could possibly mean, but the C seems to have more than the C-H.

Ash removal from the bottom of the burn chamber, a very common configuration.

Ash removal from the side.

There’s a lot more odd parts here and there that will nicely merge to make a complete cook stove.

All parts have dates ranging from 1904 to 1917, I’m not sure why that is. I do wonder if they were cast at different years and then assembled together. If that’s true I’m not sure what the date of assembly is. There’s still a lot of unknown about this stove, possibly a lot that will never be known again.

We bought another wood stove. But it’s ok, this one is just for parts, which is a bit sad as it is in really good shape. The absolutely gorgeous Glenwood we bought a couple of years back needed some TLC and had a few parts that were cracked. I got them out and I was trying to find a cast iron welder for them. But any plan to get them back in shape was imperfect in some way. Then one day, this other Glenwood from 1917 (I think) pops up online and without many details or documentation, it just looks the same. For $100 it’s simply worth a shot.

As far as I can tell it’s the exact same model minus a few bells and whistles. It’s hard to tell, there is simply very little online about 100+ year old stoves. But the pieces that were damaged on the first one are all there and are in pristine shape. Now that is a score in and of itself. I’m going to feel terrible cannibalizing it, it’s in really great shape but it is missing more than our original.

I could definitely get into restoring these beauties if I had more time. In the meantime getting good deals on stoves opportunistically and a few years before we need them has worked well for us. The Glenwood will be ready by the time we need it, most  likely to replace the Sweetheart as it moves into a shop to be built adjacent to the house. Long live the Glenwood, may it fire for another 100 years.

I might need to open a “stoves” sections on this blog.