Lessons in Woodburning 101 Chapter 22
The old shack came equipped with an ancient brick chimney whose mortar had loosened and whose interior was glassy with obsidian creosote. Every year I cleaned the stack with a homemade chimney brush, being too cheap to spring for the commercial one made of steel bristles and attached to a steel rod you could add connector lengths to for reaching the twenty feet I needed to clean. My old roommate Joe and I had made the first one out of a block of wood wrapped in chicken wire we punched down from the top with a long pole. The block was going to be pulled back up with a rope attached to an eyebolt we had ingeniously screwed to the block. Sure, we probably would be applying for a patent, sell em on late night TV by the thousands. Buy now, we’ll send you a second one same price, just add a small charge for shipping and handling, our operators are standing by.
So I stood at the peak of the roof and pushed that block, that soon-to-be-patented-and-marketed Chimney Plow (insert trademark) down the gut of that ancient brick chimney. Trouble was, the chimney was built about 1910 by hand and so it didn’t exactly go rectilinearly, it sort of curved and the block, being designed for modern masonry, didn’t. We got ourselves a long 2×4 and rammed that puppy down through fifty year old creosote, scraping away years of potentially flammable crud. Until it jammed…. This is where the rope and eyebolt would come in handy. You know, IF the eyebolt hadn’t pulled out of the block of wood. Now we had the chimney completely blocked and our sole means of heat was rendered useless. The Three Stooges couldn’t have done any better than us two idiots.
We tried bashing on the block, we took off the stovepipe and could just reach it from below, we screwed an eyebolt from below and tied a rope to it, we bashed while we pulled, we swore while we cried, we cut away chicken wire and we whittled on the block. Hours later we got it to slip free. The shack was dead cold, we were half dead and the chimney was scraped free of creosote. Well, not the glassy decades-old hard stuff in the cracks and crevices of the mortar. We decided not to worry about that as night fell over us. Some years later we would regret that decision, but as we always said when times got tough, tomorrow is soon enough.
Hits: 53
Ah, the old curvilinear, sometimes almost double helix shaped brick and mortar chimney. I ran into enough of them as a younger man I started to wonder whether Watson & Crick were in the masonry trade before they sat down and sketched out a strand of DNA. If not for the grueling disappointment during your testing phase for the Chimney Plow, a minor adjustment with a band saw and probably hammer might have turned it into a nimbler Chimney Looper. I would have bought one.
And yet, those old brick smoke stacks were an improvement over what Pa from Little House On The Prairie built to keep his family warm. A genuine wood chimney. Not wood burning mind you, but a buck-jointed, dovetailed chimney built from real wood. It’s a wonder Laura Ingalls Wilder survived to write all those books.
Well, yes, I spoze we could’ve tailored that plug to be slightly sloppier. But what is it masons always say: measure once and push hard. The real sad part of this story is that after we got that Chimney Plow out the first time, we actually managed to stick it in there tight again. Some people are immune to learning….