Favorite Baseburner #261

EarlH · By: **EarlH** On: Sun Feb 17, 2013 1:18 am

Well, I know you guys like a lot of pictures so I've uploaded a few of this Favorite baseburner I picked up a month ago. I had a small baseburner with a 12" firepot and was so happy with how it worked that I decided a larger one was in order when one came along. So this Favorite with a 16" firepot came up for sale and when I saw the thing in the guys building I knew it was going home with me. I'm sorry I really didn't take any before pictures but I really thought I would not get any restoration work done on it until this summer and would just put it back together at the house once it got home. Holy cow this thing is heavy. If the guy that had it wouldn't have had a forklift I would have needed to take it all apart there to get it loaded. I have never tried to lift a stove that was this heavy. I weighed it as I put it together this week as I was curious about that. The shipping weight was listed as 665 pounds and I weighed right at 560 pounds as I put it together. A few small pieces didn't get weighed, so the weight should be pretty close if it were on a scale.
So I got it home at the beginning of January and took it apart in my front room on some canvas and an old rug. It really wasn't terrible dirty looking until I opened up the heat runs on the base of the thing. WOW was it a mess in there. A dead bird, mud, three or four stove cranks and handles. The grate shaker for the stove was in there, half burnt magazines from the late 1960's, copenhagen cans, a measuring cup. I don't know why someone was dropping stuff down in there, but they did. Someone had been burning wood in it and so the magazine was out of it. I have it though so the stove is pretty much complete. And the mica was all in really nice shape for whatever reason. I got it all apart that Saturday and Sunday and took the pictures that show it all apart.
The other baseburners I've been around have the control for the direct draft be on the right hand side of the stove, and the opening is on the right hand side. So when it's closed the heat goes down the left rear side of the stove, around the base and then up the rear right hand side and out the chimney. This one closes in the center and the hot gasses then go down both sides and up the center. The heat runs are completely separate on the back of the stove with about 1/2" to 3/4" of space between them and the stove to let air on all four sides get heated. It's really a clever design and must have been kind of expensive. It sure makes the thing heavy. And the space under the ash pit is really nice as that lets a lot of heat out as well and helps keep the ash pit somewhat cooler. The other small baseburner I have does not have that space there and the ash pan gets much hotter.
Then I called a guy about doing the repair work on it and he asked me to bring the whole works over to his place and he said he would have it all done in a month so I ended up getting all the nickeling re-finished and the repair work done on the stove. The base plate had some issues and a few other pieces had some cracks in them. From what I've seen of these things over the years it was nothing terribly unusual. As heavy as this thing is, it's a wonder the base plate wasn't in worse shape than it was.
I'll post some more pictures of it tomorrow as it's getting kind of late. I wanted to get some of this stuff up though as these old stoves are kind of curious to look at, but very clever in design once you begin to understand the logic behind them.

wsherrick · By: **wsherrick** On: Sun Feb 17, 2013 2:10 am

NEAT !! You don't know it but you've just obtained one of the top notch, high end, only the well to do could afford Base Burners.
They have a triple tube smoke path, plus it is a double heater. Too bad it doesn't have its magazine,but; that's okay. Since you wanted a bigger stove with more capacity. Well, you got it. Some of them have attachments for outside combustion air and the whole nine yards.

EarlH · By: **EarlH** On: Sun Feb 17, 2013 9:43 am

So, here is where I was at with this thing a few days ago. I was going to post this stuff as it went along, but I just couldn't focus on both things and some path to putting this thing together was not clear so I would have to back up and do it in a different order. I've had a few of these things apart over the years and back together and they all kind of have thier own way of going back together. I'm sure the guys that do this all the time have no trouble with them, but... And I also know which side of the learning curve I'm on so I have that impediment as well! Anyway, I wanted to get a bunch of pictures of it up so you can see how these things work. These baseburners are a little mysterious to look at if you've never been around one, and it doesn't make sense until you've really looked one over and see how the heat travels through them. I hope some of the pictures kind of make sense and show that.
The fit and finish of these things really is remarkable. The guys that put these things together really were artisans and must have been proud of what they were doing. It all fits together very nicely and if something wasn't going together it was because of some dirt, old stove cement or sometimes rust I didn't have cleaned out as well as I should have. The guy that did the repair work sandblasted the parts he worked on, but I cleaned everything else up with a grinder that had a wire brush on it. Since I was planning on burning the stove I didn't see any sense in making the whole inside of the stove perfect and overcleaning stuff that was going to be all sooty et. a week later anyway. He wanted to put the whole stove together but holy cow, this thing is as heavy as an old upright piano and way more fragile. The only place I have to set it up is in my basement and I knew I'd have one heck of a time getting it down here, so I put it together down where it's going.
Before I put the top part of the back on above the kettle plate, I should have put the magazine back in. STUPID ME. I've read through a lot of old stove catalogs and all the later one's (and I would consider this a later baseburner) mention how the magazine lifts out easily without removing any of the stove parts, so I figured this one was the same way. When I got the stove, someone had been burning wood in it and the magazine was out of the stove. If I would have removed it I would have known that. And since I wanted to get the snout re-cast I figured I could put it back in at any time. That was wrong. It's not a big deal and I'll sort that out this summer but that's why the magazine is not in it. I've seen quite a few of these with burnt up and warped snouts on the magazine so I wanted to get this one re-cast and use the new one since this one is in nice shape. I'm going to get another firepot cast and grates as well since that's the stuff that wears out on these things. So, that's where it's at up to this point. It really is a nice stove and I'm very happy with it.

LsFarm · By: **LsFarm** On: Sun Feb 17, 2013 11:33 am

All I can say is WOW !

What a fascinating design. And what a puzzle of pieces.
I'm glad You started this thread to share your VERY interesting stove with us..

This stove makes me think of some antique cars I've wanted to buy, just because they were SO DIFFERENT that I just HAD to have one..

This is an amazingly well thought out design, using as many exterior surfaces to heat the room and keep the temperatures low on the iron parts.

Thanks Looking forward to the next batch of photos..

Can you start a thread on your little baseburner when you get a chance? i'd like to see it too.

Greg L

dlj · By: **dlj** On: Sun Feb 17, 2013 11:43 am

Very nice indeed! What a beautiful stove! The work you are doing to restore it is fantastic also! I look forward to seeing it fully restored and running.

Enjoy!

dj

EarlH · By: **EarlH** On: Sun Feb 17, 2013 1:44 pm

The first picture shows an original installation of an Art Garland stove. That could not have been a very large room that thing was in from the way the picture looks. The old gal wasn't going to be cold for another winter, that's for sure! On the back someone wrote, "Ma's new stove". It's a postcard and was never sent, so there is no postmark, but it's a divided back postcard so it was printed after the middle of 1907. Before that you could not write messages on the backs of postcards, only the address.
Now this Favorite stove is all back together. I got that done on Thursday night and put a small fire in it to get it broken in. You kind of need to do that with a stove when it's "new" so all these things that are really tight again have a chance to loosen up a little bit and can move around with the heat cycles.
Friday night and Saturday it got down to around 5-6 degrees here so I was able to open the old girl up a little bit and get it a little warmer. At first I thought the furnace had kicked on for some reason as I was going back down the basement steps to see how the thing was doing. I had turned on the furnace fan to push the air around the house. This thing really will put off some heat! It really does a nice job of it. It holds way more coal than the small stove does and with the side of the stove at around 500 degrees will do a nice job of heating the place. Right now the side of the stove is at 400 degrees. The base is at 275 and where it goes into the chimney the smoke pipe is at 190 according to this infared thermometer. I am REALLY pleased with this stove.
I have not put refractory cement in the firepot yet. It was covered with really thick crusty black creosote or something from when someone was burning wood in it. I needed to get that all burned out of there. Plus, it's the end of the heating season almost and I really shouldn't need a very hot fire to get through the rest of this winter. And I want to get the firepot re-cast and put the new one in the stove. I'm also finding with this stove that the firepot does not get red hot very easily like it tended to do in that small baseburner I was using before this one. I had a Round Oak baseburner that was the same size as this one and sold it about 5 years ago. I got more out of that stove than I have in this one. But the firepot on it was burnt badly and really warped. Wow they must have had some fires in that thing to do that to it. A couple of the cast iron keepers for the mica were warped on that one as well. Someone much have filled that thing with coal and just walked away with the draft open or something. I didn't have access to hard coal in those days so that was why I let stove go. I'm sure glad I did, because this is a much nicer stove than the Round Oak one was. That Round Oak is a nice, heavy stove. But this one is a heavy stove as well and much nicer looking. Those old guys years ago sure knew how to dress these pigs up so you wanted to bring one home with you, didn't they? I guess 'eye candy' is the term for it these days.
And then those last pictures. You see these openings at the bottom of the firebowl and wonder what those things were for, and they are poker holes. That way you don't have to open up the bottom doors if ash banks up on the side of the firepot and poke around at the bottom of the fire to get it to drop loose. When the stove is hot, you'll get a lot of fly ash into the room of course doing that. These poker holes keep that from being a problem. That's why the poker that came with baseburners is just a straigt one, and not terribly long. The one with the solid handle is for a Penninsular. I had a nice one a long time ago for a Garland stove but got talked out if it... The wire handle one's work just fine.
I'll get some pictures of it posted with a fire tonight. The one's I took didn't turn out and they seem to work better if the room is dark.
Gosh this is a nice forum to read through. I've sure learned a lot from you guys. I can sure understand wanting to own a couple dozen of these things, but I won't as these two are a great plenty for me. This Favorite stove is a behemoth, they made one that's got a 17" firepot and weighs another 55 pounds, but this one is big enough. 565 pounds is bad enough to move without having another 50-60 pounds sitting up there! This one already feels like it's been screwed to the floor.

nortcan · By: **nortcan** On: Sun Feb 17, 2013 7:58 pm

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Beautiful stove.

buck24 · By: **buck24** On: Sun Feb 17, 2013 8:57 pm

Really nice stove :!:

Good luck with her. Another work of art.

wsherrick · By: **wsherrick** On: Mon Feb 18, 2013 12:26 am

Thanks for the photos. I would like to see some more with the fire in it.
Some performance info on it would be nice as well. I like to hear about how well someone's stove is running.

EarlH · By: **EarlH** On: Mon Feb 18, 2013 10:05 am

Well there's a few pictures I took last night of the fire. It's 28 out this morning so I don't have much of a fire in it right now, but the hottest place I could find on the stove is 411 degrees with the infared thermometer. Most of the rest of the stove above the firepot is right around 350. At the top of the rear heat runs it's 305 and at the bottom it's 221. The base of the stove at the front is at 185. Where the cast iron elbo is, it's at 160 and there is about 2 1/2 feet of stovepipe to the chimney. Where it goes into the chimney it's reading at 118. So that's kind of interesting how the temp drops down like it does.
A long time ago ran an old book on stoves. The guy wouldn't let me have it and in those days I did not know what a base heater was, or a baseburner for that matter, but I wrote some of the numbers down. In those days I had only heard these things called "hard coal stoves". Or really fancy parlor stoves, that sort of thing. So, I did write down some of the numbers in that book so I could figure out what they meant by them
It was under the heading "How Large of a Stove Do I Need?"
This was in a well built home in -15 degree weather the stove was to heat a space to 72 degrees without over-fireing.
13 1/4" firepot should heat 3500-4500 cubic feet
15" firepot should heat 5000-600
17" " " " 6500-8000
18 1/2" " " 8000-10,000
20" " " 9000-11,000
If you have a base heater with a revertable flue (I'd never heard that term in those days either)
They figured you could add about 50 to 60 percent to those numbers. The example they gave was
and 18 1/2" firepot with the extra money spent on having it in a base heater, would expand your
heating capacity from 8-10 thousand cubic feet, to 12 to 16 thousand square feet. Depending on
how well built your building or house was. Of course they had no insulation in those days. I didn't write down
the name of the book or catalog for whatever reason, but it was from around 1905 - 1910 as I remember it.
But they wanted you to understand why spending another $8-$10 may be worth it in the end.
It's some interesting numbers there.

dlj · By: **dlj** On: Mon Feb 18, 2013 9:28 pm

I'd have to convert my house into cubic feet to figure out how much I agree or not with those numbers. I heat my whole house with the #6 but also it rarely gets to -15 here. I'll have to do some measurements and get back on this one... it is indeed interesting...

dj

Scottscoaled · By: **Scottscoaled** On: Mon Feb 18, 2013 11:43 pm

That stove is BEAUTIFUL!!! Absolutely gorgeous

I'm a convicted stoker man. That is the first stove I've seen that makes me want to build a house around it instead of a stoker boiler. I want it. Plain and simple. Yes, you have a trophy stove

EarlH · By: **EarlH** On: Tue Feb 19, 2013 12:06 am

dlj wrote:I'd have to convert my house into cubic feet to figure out how much I agree or not with those numbers. I heat my whole house with the #6 but also it rarely gets to -15 here. I'll have to do some measurements and get back on this one... it is indeed interesting...

dj

You know, I wrote those numbers down probably 8-10 years ago from that old heating book and I wish I had put a little bit more information with it so I knew what they came from now. It was one of those deals where I figured I would remember... Ha! My house works out to be around 13,800 cubic feet and this stove with a 16" firepot will work fine for it. I don't expect the whole house to be 72 though and most people (at least around here anyway) did not heat the rooms they didn't use. My Grandmother didn't heat the bedrooms hardly at all. I remember staying overnight there when I was a kid in the late 60's and she would put 6-8 hot water bottles in bed and sometimes heat up those soapstone foot warmers for buggies and wrap them in towels and put them down by your feet when it was really cold. That woman did not waste anything and even though they heated with cobs for the most part, she didn't even like to see them get used if they didn't need to be.
But those heating numbers have always kind of made me wonder too. But I do like the way they do it in cubic feet as I can visualize how much space my house is and compare it to those numbers. If they are really "honest" numbers is hard to say. We are past the -15 weather here for the winter so maybe next year I'll get to test this stove out a little better! Take care now.

wsherrick · By: **wsherrick** On: Tue Feb 19, 2013 3:17 am

Of course the ancestors would think cubic feet rather than square feet. The cubic area of the space heated is a much more relevant measurement.
I've done my share of reading trade magazines and what they expected. They believed and rightly so, that each occupant of an area required so much cubic space of fresh air to be healthful. They also thought that houses shouldn't be overly tight and that the structure should have so many air changes per hour to maintain health.
That's why you have high ceilings, large windows and stairway structures designed for convective flow in a well built home from the era. Easier to cool in Summer, heat could travel up staircases and through transom windows in the winter.
The rapid increase in Respiratory Ailments, increased susceptibility to problems like moisture and mold problems of recent decades is directly due in a large part to the fad of living in hermetically sealed houses.

EarlH · By: **EarlH** On: Tue Feb 19, 2013 9:08 am

And yI painted for an old guy back from 1985 to 1988 when I got hired by UPS. Bill used to say in those days about how much trouble the air-tight houses were. He would talk about how the paint would pop right off of them and all the troubles they got into with mold and so forth. He did not thing they were healthy at all, and for the reasons you talk about. He had done house painting starting in the 1920's and for awhile in the 30's worked for the Packard Motor Company woodgraining dash boards. But he moved to this part of the country around 1950 and kept track of all the house he painted in a book. Wrote down what kind of paint was put on the house, a few notes about how it was built and anything ususual to him that was done to it so he could look back at it in the future and know if it worked or not. One thing was, the houses with plywood overhang where they would spend the other $20 in those days to seal the back side of the plywood with shellac would show hardly any paint peeling 40 years later. Those that didn't looked like hell. And I see some of those houses yet when I'm out and about and after another 25 years, they still look pretty good if they have been maintained. But some most of the super-insulated houses that were being built back in the 80's have had all kinds of problems with rotting windows and siding. One I was in a few years ago had shifted around so much I could see where all the studs were behind the sheetrock! In the end, Bill was right. I don't know if the houses being built today are better off or not. My house was built in 1912 and I have insulated it but I have not re-sided it or put in new windows. The old storms fit well and it's a comfortable house. I don't think it's hard to heat, but others might feel differently.
Those old timers had thier way of thinking though, that's for sure. It's below zero here today. Maybe -3 or so and my Mom's Mom would have opened the whole house up and let it air out for the whole day when it was like this. She would do that a couple or three times through the winter leaving the water run a little through the taps so the pipes didn't freeze. That way "The stuff that has no business being here would freeze to death"... According to her! She was a little suspicious of having a toilet in the house and more than once I heard her say that she really wasn't sure that thing was a step in the right direction. And would say "Nowadays people eat out in the back yard and they crap in the house!" She was a funny old gal. She would be 109 now. My Mom is 81 in a few weeks. It's probably a good thing most of those people are gone now. Minnie would really have some funny commentary on what she saw going on these days though.

Favorite Baseburner #261

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