Maybe I should choose my words more carefully.
In describing my wish to spend a couple of hours processing firewood yesterday morning, I used expressions like “I got the itch” and, after I’d finished, “It scratched my itch.” Now the figurative has become literal.
I knew I risked encountering ticks and chiggers when I waded into the brush. The season isn’t over, not by a long shot, and I took all the usual precautions. But that didn’t prevent me from waking up today with a hundred (or more) angry, itchy chigger bites demanding to be scratched.
I laughed. I might as well.
I took advantage of another unseasonably cool morning (56°F outside, 60°F in the cabin) to sit down with our second-hand woodstove and give it a once-over. We knew that the door didn’t close properly or latch securely, and the unit came with a pile of parts — some assembly required.
A close look at the hinges revealed that the upper pin wasn’t seated quite right. I used a pair of ViseGrips to rotate it, which changed the angle of the entire door. I got it where I wanted it, tapped both pins lightly, worked the door back and forth, and called it fixed.
Next up was the latch. The striker plate on the body of the stove didn’t look quite right, as if it had been bashed repeatedly with the latch in the wrong position. I removed it, took it out to the stoop and did a little bashing of my own — three smacks with a hammer flattened it out, which I presumed was its original condition.
Installed again, it still wouldn’t catch the latch. I took it back off, added a couple of lock washers (the closest thing to shims that I had) and resecured it. And that worked.
A little fiddling saved us real money. I could scratch a latch kit ($95) and hinge pins ($12) off my shopping list.
From a box that came Home with the woodstove, I pulled a bunch of soapstone fire bricks, two grates and an odd T-shaped hunk of iron. I’d studied an online parts diagram of this particular Hearthstone model, so I had a pretty good idea of what went where.
It still took about ten minutes to put all of the pieces in their proper places. Eventually, I solved the puzzle.
Part of the process was fitting and securing eight fire bricks. Alas, the box held only seven.
That’s right, boys and girls — we’re one brick short of a stove.
Soapstone ain’t cheap. A single fire brick, just one, costs $56. Since we’re on a tight budget, we’ll be replacing our missing soapstone with vermiculite ($20 for a box of four bricks). It’ll serve the purpose, and just one won’t hurt the stove’s performance.
From there, I moved on to test-fitting the flue. It comprises five pieces — trim plate, adapter, elbow and two sections of stovepipe. The good news is our placement of the stove makes one of the pipes (a horizontal run that I would’ve had to fashion) totally unnecessary. The elbow meets the adapter perfectly, like I’d planned it that way.
The bad news is that I wrestled with the vertical stovepipe, a telescoping affair, for over an hour today and failed to seat it on the stove. I crimped and bent and twisted and cussed, to no avail. It’s the right size and all, I just couldn’t get it set.
And that’s when I quit for the day.
I need to think about this. I have some ideas.
But I made progress today, and that’s the name of the game.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB