Poke, Shovel, Sweep, and Blow

My readers are aware that my wife, Annie, and I are fixing up our cabin in the Ozark Mountains at the same time we are converting a dilapidated old garage from the early 20^th century into a writing and art studio/man cave for me. 

Well, one of my goals for both projects is to heat them, at least partially, with wood.  So, what’s the one thing you have to have to heat with wood?

OK, besides wood.

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I have heated with wood to one extent or another for the greatest portion of my life.  The house Mom and Dad moved us into when I was three years old had a fireplace.  After that, every winter Mom insisted that we build a fire in that fireplace from time to time.  Our little family would gather around the hearth, playing our favorite board-game, Sorry, and eating a pan of popcorn while passing around a bottle of Pepsi.

Those were good times.

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When Mom, Dad, and I bought the farm outside Malden during my high school years, one of the first things we did was install a wood stove in the old house. 

Cutting and splitting firewood with my dad was a pleasant way for a growing boy to begin to feel the joys of being a man, providing for his family, feeling young muscles working and strengthening.  It was also how I really began to know and understand my dad.

The first house I bought and later moved my beautiful young wife into had a wood stove already in it.  With only a couple exceptions every house we’ve lived in has been set up for a wood stove. 

Our sons grew up helping cut and haul firewood. 

Over the years, the warmth from all those fires has found a home within my heart and spread throughout my system.  So it just makes sense that I wanted to have wood stoves in both the cabin and the studio.

I shopped around and found a couple used wood stoves with glass inserts in the doors.  Not only could we enjoy the heat, we could take pleasure in the beauty of the fire at the same time.

Warmth and peace; what more can you ask?

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So my wife and I went to work and managed to get the cabin and studio set up with the wood stoves I’d acquired.  I fired them up and learned their quirks and foibles and reacquainted myself with the finer details of operating a wood stove.  There were some minor obstacles along the way but all were overcome…except for one.

Cleanup.

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Anyone who has ever had a wood stove for heat or even just enjoyed a comforting fireplace in their den has found themselves faced with the task of cleaning up the ash left by the fire.  Besides that there is also the necessity to maximize the burning by maneuvering the logs around so as to keep the fuel in the flame.

Makes sense.

These goals require tools.  At their most basic…uh, let me back up a little. 

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While on Marine Corps maneuvers and while camping, I have tended many, many campfires using just a stick, which I then added to my fire when it reached the end of its usefulness.  In the Marines we called that field expedience.  In a home most people don’t want to be poking around with a stick.  It can really add to the mess made by burning, not to mention it’s not always easy to find just the right stick when it’s needed.

Thus our ancestors figured out some basic tools that came in handy to accomplish the tasks necessary.  Different people around the planet have designed tools to do what they wanted so there is virtually no end to the number of different device s available for working with wood fires.

Now we get back to that sentence I started in the earlier paragraph, “At their most basic,” fireplace or wood stove tools consist of a poker for prying and moving logs around; a heat resistant broom for sweeping ash; and a scoop for, uh, scooping up that ash.  While, in the past, I have designed a wood stove so that I could build a fire in it late in the year and keep it burning all winter just by adding wood, now we often won’t have a fire in either the cabin or the studio for weeks at a time. Something else that comes in handy at times, especially in the smaller stoves I use today, is a bellows.  When starting a fire, not everything just bursts into flame at the strike of a match.  Sometimes the trash paper, grass, or birch bark I use for tinder burns hot and fast at first, then dies down before the kindling gets “good-n-started.”  Other times I’ll discover that the fire I’ve used to keep the cabin warm has burned up most of the fuel and needs to be built back up.

Besides the fun of taking on a challenge, it saves a little money to coax a dying fire back into flame by blowing air gently onto weak but still alive coals while discriminately adding kindling or tinder.  A good bellows can be manipulated to blow air gently on a small spark of heat so it gets hotter but isn’t blown out, and then more strongly as the fire builds.

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Somewhere not long after our most recent wood-stove adventure started, I lucked into a chance to acquire a set of fireplace tools made using imitation antlers molded of resin, such that the antlers look almost totally real.  The manufacturer made the set with an imitation deer antler, resting on its points, to act as the base, and a fake elk antler as the support post from which the steel poker, broom, and scoop are hung.  Added to that, the handles of the tools are made of imitation antler too.

I don’t remember exactly how much I paid for it but it seems like it was around $70.  Not bad at all considering all the other similar sets were priced in the hundreds of dollars.

Then I bought a bellows off eBay and hung it with the set I’d bought.  I’ve built enough fires in the stove at the cabin with that set so that I consider it tried and true.

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So I bought the stove and fireplace set for the cabin before we even knew we were going to move to Piggott.  Once we did make that move and found that we’d acquired the old garage for my studio I wanted something similar for that future domicile of creativity.

The stove was the easy part.  The steel part of the tool set was even easier.  The couple we’d bought the house from had been engaged in buying, remodeling, and “flipping” homes in their spare time.  Ours was one they had originally chosen to keep for themselves and had thus put maybe a little extra into it.  For one they’d built-in a gas-burning fireplace.  While not what I would have wanted myself, preferring the real thing, it is quite nice and Annie and I use it quite often.

The important point here is that the previous owners, instead of buying some cheap, plastic tools to decorate the gas heater, spent the extra money and bought real, steel fireplace tools.  They looked great but we didn’t feel a strong need to display them alongside the gas fireplace.

So I had my fireplace tools for my studio…or did I? 

You know me better than that.  Sure I could have used the set as it was, but I wanted a bit of a challenge so decided to make the whole thing part of my project…part of ME, if you will.  My preference was to use the main parts to make a set of tools myself.  I unscrewed the cast handles from the tools and set them, along with the stand, aside for some future project.  Those steel tools were my treasure.

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Like so many lovers of the outdoors I have gathered quite a collection of antlers, bones, shells, and similar natural collectibles over the years.  So it happens that I had in my collection enough antlers and antler-parts to make them part of my future fireplace tool set.  If I did it right I’d end up with a set similar to the one I’d already bought that was made out of resin.  That resin one could be left out at the cabin.  The one I made would be more valuable, to me at least, and would be safer from theft in the studio beside our house.

I ordered a bellows that would blend with my new set off eBay and prepared to start creating.

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It just so happened that, in my collection of antler pieces I had several cut-off tips from elk antlers.  They were each 7”-9” long, which made them just about perfect for handles.  I needed three for the poker, scoop, and broom that would be basically identical.  I just sawed the cut-off ends square and drilled holes in them to closely match the threaded ends on the steel tools.  Strong Gorilla Glue was applied to the tool ends which were then shoved into their new antler handles.  I set them aside to cure while I went on to other things.

Also in my “stash” there was a matched-set of deer antlers that were still attached to their skull plate, which had broken apart at the center-suture over the years.  When I put the pair on a flat surface with the tines down I found that they sat quite steady.

I arranged that pair together in the most stable position possible on some plastic bags, to protect my floor from drips and brought out the Gorilla Glue.  After using masking tape to fabricate dams to contain the liquid glue I spent the next few days adding small amounts of glue until I’d built up enough to hold the two antlers sturdily. 

When that glue had cured I got out a five-point shed elk antler that was in almost perfect condition, as in, no broken tines.  By balancing the antler bur on the two deer antlers, maneuvering it to the best position, and propping it in position, I was able to apply my ever-faithful Gorilla Glue and let it cure.

This creation held pretty well, but was easy to move from side to side, leaving the impression that even my dependable Gorilla Glue wouldn’t work for something so far from what it was designed for.  It did, however, hold plenty strong enough for me to drill pilot holes through the deer antler base and into the elk antler support.  I drove a few long wood screws into these pilot holes which added immensely to the strength of the assembly.

When I stood up the bracket and base assembly I found that the change in balance due to the added elk antler made the base less stable than I’d previously thought, so I took the ungainly creation to my grinder and carefully and with frequent double-checks, ground down a couple of the tips.  Before long it was WAY more stable and seemed quite sturdy.

Now I gathered some of the extra coffee cup hooks I had left from building my coffee klatch shelf in the cabin.  Carefully eyeballing things, I drilled parallel pilot holes in the top two tines and in the middle of the “Y” between them.  I screwed the hooks into the freshly-drilled holes.  Then I used pliers to fine-tune the direction of the hooks.  Next, again using the pliers, I opened the hooks so that their ends pointed upwards.  Lastly I “by-guess-and-by-gosh” drilled pocket-holes in the handles for the tools.  I used the same method to check the fit and adjust the holes so that the tools would all hang the same, or at least look like they do.

At this point the bellows I’d ordered off eBay arrived.  Although it worked and looked fine I just couldn’t leave well enough alone.  I pulled out a couple more elk antler tips and measured and cut them off square.  While I was playing with fast-spinning sharp objects, I cut lap-joints in the squared-off ends of each, on the top of one and the bottom of the other.

Simple enough, I then glued and clamped the reshaped antler tips onto the handles that had been built onto the bellows at the factory.

When the glue cured I got another of my coffee cup hooks and went through the process again of carefully eye-balling and by-guess-and-by-gosh-ing to add another hanger to another tine on the elk antler.  Lo-and-behold, the bellows looked right at home with the other fireplace tools hanging on my elk and deer antler tool rack.

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Now to get my studio close enough to completion to actually use the stove in it this winter.  Then I can sit in the warmth by the gentle light of the fire in the wood stove and, well…probably take a nap in my studio.

Won’t you join me?

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