OUR $100 WOOD-BURNING FURNACE SAVES US $1,200 A YEAR!
(Page 3 of 5)
November/December 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
As soon as the grate supports were in place, we welded a 24" X 36" 16-gauge steel plate to the bottom of the box formed by the vertical front, back, and walls of the firebox. This sheet of flat stock, of course, made the floor of the combustion chamber's ashpit. With the 28" X 36" piece of 16-gauge steel welded in place on top of the firebox, the heart of our furnace was complete. We were ready to surround the finished combustion chamber with an air jacket constructed of 20-gauge metal.
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Our first step in adding that jacket was to carefully align a 36"-square sheet of 20-gauge plate against the rear edges of the firebox's walls. When that sheet of metal exactly matched the 16-gauge plate on the front of the combustion chamber (with its upper corners extending 4 inches out past and 4 inches above the upper corners of the firebox and its lower corners flush with the floor of the ashpit but sticking out horizontally 6 inches on each side of the pit's lower corners), we welded it in place.
Then we built a frame for the rest of the air jacket by welding angle iron around all four edges of the 36"-square 16-gauge sheet of steel on the front of the furnace and around all four edges of the 36"square sheet of 24-gauge plate on the back of the wood-burner. We also welded angle along the bottom of the sides of the firebox.
The sides of the air jacket itself were next formed by making a 6"long, right-angle bend parallel to the short edge of a 36" X 42" piece of 20-gauge sheet steel. This gave us a 36" X 36" finished "side" with a 6" wide "lip" along its "bottom".
These sides plus a 36" X 36" top were then attached to the firebox by drilling and tapping right through the sheet metal into the angle iron framework underneath. Asbestos paper gaskets between all facing metal surfaces make the jacket airtight.
THE FINISHING TOUCHES
We cut the opening for our wood-burner's loading door as far to the right on the furnace's front face as we could. This allows us to chuck in really big chunks of fuel, roll them to the left . . . and still have plenty of room to heave in even more oversized pieces of wood. The cast-iron door—which we scavenged from an old barrel stove—that covers the opening has a built-in adjustable air control along its bottom. This (plus the fact that the furnace's firebox is all-welded and airtight) eliminates the need for any dampers in the main chimney pipe.
What we have instead is a small, secondary flue built into the upper left corner (higher than the loading door on the right) of the wood-burner's front panel. This little stovepipe is equipped with an adjustable damper which can be completely closed (and usually is). The only time we open this damper is when we want to start a fire or add fuel to an existing blaze. Cracking the damper in the small vent at such times clears smoke from the top of the firebox so that none of the fumes pour out into the basement when the loading door is opened.
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