How To Use Wood Stoves (And Use Them Safe!)

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From Wood Stoves: How to Make and Use Them by Ole Wik, copyright 1977 by the author. Reprinted with the permission of Ole Wilk and of Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, Anchorage, Alaska, and available in paperback ($5 95) from any good bookstore or from Mother's Bookshelf.

In 1976, veteran arctic outdoorsman Ole Wik wrote How to Build an Oil Barrel Stove... and that worthy book-which found an enthusiastic readership-now appears as just one chapter of Ole's latest effort: Wood Stoves: How to Make and Use Them.

Ole's lived in the Alaskan bush, "where self-sufficiency is still a way of life", for 12 years, "always with homemade wood stoves", and he writes with great authority on the subjects of building one's own stove or making an existing one perform exactly as you want it to.

The following excerpts from Ole's new book-which may be the only one ever published on the design and construction of wood-burning stoves-will give you a good idea of the thoroughness and precision with which Ole Wik puts his ideas across. Read on and learn ... and remember: There's so much more wood stove wisdom where this came from!

USING WOOD STOVES

Keeping a fire in a wood stove is like having a pet in the house with you. A fire needs your attention at regular intervals, and is in danger of either dying or running amok if your judgment slips. You have to feed it the right things at the appropriate times, and you have to carry its waste products out of the house. In return it will work for you, cooking your meals and heating your water and living space.

The kind of experience you have with your fire depends entirely upon your equipment and fuel and how you use them. Your fire may be a gentle, dependable, obedient servant, doing what you want it to do when you want it done ... or it may be capricious and stubborn, misbehaving continually, a source of frequent irritation.

I'll never forget the time I watched a schoolteacher, new to the north, trying to fry meat on an oil-barrel wood stove in an Eskimo friend's house. "What's wrong with this thing?" she asked. "I just filled it." She was prodding the meat with a big fork, and I could tell by the absence of sound in the pan that the meat wasn't cooking. At the same time, she was shielding her thighs from the intensely hot sides of the stove.

I could see the bright glow of a fine bed of coals at the draft hole, and began to wonder why the frying pan wasn't heating up. So I got up, looked into the firebox, and saw that she'd laid green birch on top of the coals. The birch shielded the stove top, so the coals radiated heat only to the sides of the stove.

I took the poker and slid the birch off the coals so that it would shield the sides of the stove rather than the top, and then I laid a couple of sticks of dry spruce in its place. The sides cooled right down, flames from the dry wood started heating the stove top, and- shortly- the meat in the pan began to sizzle.