30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Eight: Wood Heat

Late summer and early fall were insanely busy times for me. Getting ready for my first "real" winter in Oregon meant that I needed to get the wood burning stove installed in the Housetruck and prepare a supply of firewood to keep it stoked.

Installing the stove wasn't particularly difficult. I purchased a six inch roof jack and blue steel stove pipe at Quackenbush's, a venerable hardware store located in the downtown of Eugene. The sales clerk who helped me wasn't too sure about installing a chimney on a flat metal roof, but I was fairly certain that the jack that I purchased could be secured to the roof using sheet metal screws and putty. The clerk made the comment that he could tell people who heated with wood as soon as they walked into the store by the sooty aroma on their clothes.

The jack did install easily on the truck roof, and the pipe fitted together with two 90 degree elbows to provide an offset to avoid a steel beam in the roof. This gave the pipe the classic "bent pipe" look that nearly all truck installations seem to have. It also made installation of the pipe easier with the stove in place because the two elbows could be connected at the horizontal joint between them after putting the top and bottom sections in their respective places.

The first fire I lit was a fairly small one, but the heat from the stove made the kraft-faced insulation behind the stove immediately turn black, as if it was about to burst into flame! After damping the fire down, I realized that the black was caused by the tarry treatment on the interior of the facing bleeding through to the face. The lesson was learned, however, and I found a square section of 1/8" asbestos hardboard to put behind the stove to protect the bare insulation from becoming too warm.

Firewood was a different matter. I was very dedicated to cutting all of my wood without the use of petroleum products (i.e. chainsaw), so I purchased a small bow saw to do the job and built a sawbuck to support the wood while I worked. It didn't take to long to figure out why power tools were invented. Hand sawing soft wood like fir or cedar was a workout, and I switched the saw from hand to hand to build up muscles in both arms equally. Sawing through hardwoods like oak was a completely different matter altogether. Some larger pieces of wood required a rest break in the middle of the cut to gather some reserves to continue.

Somehow, I managed to buck up a fair supply of wood, split it (while sharpening my skill with the axe and maul), and get it stacked under the truck for the approaching cold weather. My only surprise turned out to be that it was not necessary to split the hardwood into as small as pieces as I thought, so I ended up with no larger logs to bank up overnight fires with.

Now that I had the ability to heat the truck interior, I removed the (!) unvented (!) gas heater that I had been fueling from a propane tank, and began to enjoy the coziness of wood heat.