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first ashes
Monday, February 8 2010
We've had the new woodstove since January 5th, but today was the first time I'd ever taken ashes out of it. The old woodstove burned its wood on a grate through which the ashes would fall, and I'd have to take the ashes out on at least a weekly basis. This new stove has no such grate and the ashes accumulate in the firebox. It seems they are burned more thoroughly there and are reduced to a lesser volume (this theory is confirmed by the absence of black charcoal kernals mixed into it). Today I removed between one and a half and two gallons of ashes, about a third of the total ashes in the stove. I did this mostly as a side effect of looking for a silver hoop earring that Gretchen had accidently flipped into the stove in a freak accident. After much searching, I finally found the earring among the many staples and other steel objects suspended in the ashes. (Happily, the temperatures in the firebox never approach 1763 degrees Fahrenheit, silver's melting point.)
I spent most of the day working on the ongoing migration of a friend's site from Cold Fusion to, well, another Cold Fusion host (until I can find the time to migrate its functionality to PHP/MySQL).
At one point I went into the woods in hopes of cutting some more firewood but had to give up when my chainsaw stopped working. It was making a scary clunky metallic sound and I was worried I'd destroyed its engine yet again. This time the problem turned out to be that the nut holding the flywheel to the crank shaft had gone loose, and that nut was easily tightened. Still, I have a Stihl, one of the most respected (and expensive) brands in chainsaws, yet the damn thing is an order or magnitude less reliable than the Dodge Dart I bought for $200. Are chainsaws really so impossible to make so they work every time you need to use them?
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