Sunday, January 16, 2011

Grate

The wood stove has been underperforming of late and I observed how poorly air was circulating, so I decided to devote Sunday to making a grate for it. It took me a while casting around in my mind among those I had seen and the materials I have on hand. I remembered seeing one made from a thick sheet of steel with long slits cut into it so that it could be bent to form a basket shape by spreading out the splits. I toyed with duplicating, but instead the materials lent the thing a different shape, I had some old rebar that I latched on to one day long ago when walking the dog, a local bridge was being rebuilt and there were lots of scraps of bar that fell into the river during the work, some of these accompanied us home. I used an old grinding disk as a template for size and made a series of shrinking arcs from the rebar bending them in the flypress. Then I bent a couple of little supports and welded the bars into that. I couldn't resist letting the fire burn down and hoiking out the coals into the scuttle so that I could try out the grate in the evening. It seemed OK, but I tried it in the stove sideways first. Even so it worked very well to get air to the back of the stack.