Our Wood Burning Stove, The left door glass is split in two (picture taken before we bought the house)

It’s getting colder….I’m still warm enough but granted I’m almost always warm enough.  My family on the other hand, they get cold pretty quickly.  In our new house we have a wood burning stove.  The previous owner didn’t use it a lot and he used a ton of propane to heat this house.  We are looking to save some money….cause saving money is nice.  I talked to a few people that have one of these and they’ve told me that they barely ever, IF EVER, use anything but these to heat their houses.  The one we have is rated for a house up to 5,000 sq feet, so we’re well within that range.  The owner before the previous owner installed ventilation to go upstairs for this, so it was definitely used previously to heat this house.

So, I decide I’m going to fix it up and get it back into working order.  First things first, we need parts!  Back at the NJ State Fair (in Sussex County, not the wannabe fair at the Meadowlands) we ran into a guy from a company up here that carries parts for these stoves.  I called him up about two weeks ago and told him what I needed.  “No problem!  I can get you the glass for $44.49 and the rest of the parts should be pretty cheap.  I’ll call you back tomorrow with the rest of the prices”…..Tomorrow came and went.  Two days later he calls me back…”Keith, I have bad news.  ALL of the parts for your stove are discontinued.  We can’t get them anymore.”

Uh oh…..

I check the internet….my great friend the internet.  I find a company called Black Swan (http://www.blackswan.com) that carries parts.  Not only do they carry parts but they had an entire parts list for my stove.  I start putting the things I need in my shopping cart.  Then I remembered…..what if these parts are on back order or they don’t actually have them?  I decided to give them a ring.  It turns out the guy from the company was right….the parts ARE discontinued…….BUT!….Black Swan knows how popular these parts are so they had them fabricated and they keep a good quantity of them in stock!  $200 later and I ordered my parts.  They came in on Tuesday the 12th.

I open the box and find my brand new glass, a full gasket kit, a new latch for the ash bin, 2 new frames to hold the glass in place, and a removable handle.  I’m feeling confident!

Doors off the stove

I started off by removing the doors from the stove, just a matter of lifting them out of their hinges….pretty simple.  I take them into my “almost finished” work room (I’ll have pictures and a new post about it sometime soon) and begin to remove both frames that hold the glass in place.  A little WD40 does the trick and the right door (with the good but dirty glass) gives me no trouble as I take the frame off.  I move to the left door….take out the top bolt…nice….okay I go for the bottom right bolt….SNAP….not feeling so confident anymore as the bolt snapped off leaving most of the threaded part of the bolt in the hole.  Oh crap….  I move on to the bottom left bolt…..SNAP….my jaw dropped and my heart sank.  I know what a pain in the ass it is to remove snapped screws from things.  I stop everything I’m doing and I call Lenny, he’ll know what to do, he’s worked with stoves before.  He calms me down letting me know that a machinist can do the job…but it will take about an hour for each one to be drilled out and re-threaded.  He figured it might cost me around $100 to fix….ouch.  Since I’m not one to just go off of what one person tells me…it was time for me to get a second opinion from one of my dearest friends…..the internet.  After doing a search about this sort of problem I was directed to buy an “Easy Out Kit” for about $20.  I contact our local hardware store and they have it in stock.  I headed down there to buy it and explained everything that happened and brought a screw along with me.  They directed me to buy just one screw extractor and a “Hardened Steel” drill bit (5/64″).  They told me to screw into it about a quarter of an inch and then insert the extractor and turn counter clockwise so that it catches the sides causing the snapped screw to spiral out.  Sounded easy enough…….

I get home and begin drilling into the snapped screw…I looked like the typical “non-handy man” standing over my work bench holding the electric drill as carefully as I could all while leaning against the bench with a plastic tote lid held up in front of me.  I figured “This drill be snaps it will fly right at me”.  Granted I was too stupid to remember to buy safety goggles too….so I was squinting while I did this ready to duck and cover should anything go wrong.  I get most of the way down into the screw and I’m feeling confident again!  I grab the screw extractor and I put it in and start spinning it to the left….it catches!  I then realize…..I don’t have any way of actually turning this extractor with any force….they forget to sell me a tap wrench!  I take the extractor out and put it aside, I might as well drill out the other screw and have Lauren get me a tap wrench at Home Depot on her way home.  I start to drill the other screw……..SNAP!  There goes my hardened steel drill bit….no idea where…but there it went!  Another email to Lauren….have her pick me up 2 more drill bits, some more hardened steel.  Lauren gets home later and she hands me two drill bits….no tap wrench.  She forgot the first email but remembered the second.  I called it a night….I’ll go get the tap wrench in the morning.

So I head out and buy that tap wrench this morning, along with some safety goggles and a file.  I get home after spending a good $25 on these things.  I place the extractor into the tap wrench and I get it snug into the drilled out hole…..just got to turn it as gently as I can while trying to spin out that screw……SNAP!  There goes the screw extractor!  I’m now back to square one!

After returning the tap wrench to the store I bought it from I went to the local hardware store again and this time I brought the door with me.  After looking it over they recommended that I go see Ferenc Zoltan.  With a name like that I thought he might magically fix it……boy was I right!  The guy is a machinist, we had passed his place a few times and I remembered where he lived but never knew what the place was.  I went to see him and he charged me $10 and had the door fixed perfectly within a half an hour.

Almost Finished!

You may notice how clear the left side is in the picture above….that’s the brand new glass.  If the glass was cheaper I would have bought new glass for the right side too….but it’s not really “looks” that I’m after….it’s heat for my family.  This year now…we should be toasty warm….well…if we can get some more firewood.

~NFM