Hello all. My Jotul f400 is currently burning a run of old shed roof beams joists etc, all woodworm infested along with several bent bolts/nails/cable pins and other fixings per piece. Good heat, but tricky with the ash. I'm thinking along the lines of a magnetic poker....ideally something I can turn off to drop debris. One of my old dial test indicators has a mag base, with a plunger to set or release and works well.....but I do not know how. Now I know you all burn perfect splits taken from deep within snowbound picturesque forests, but here in the uk , we don't have too many of those. So I use what there is plenty of, and at the moment its the roof structure of an old shed. I'm sure someone out there has already made themselves a tool for getting the nails etc out from hot ash easily. Care to share ?
Wait for the ash to cool, then either sift it, or grad a magnet through it. Before, you dump it for long term storage.
All of that questionable ash goes to the landfill for me. I have good ash for the garden and bad ash for the garbage can.
Just curious why you would want to get them out when the ashes are hot? Personally I’d do the let them cool and sift with hardware cloth(American for wire screen) as well.
Why does the iron it need separated out ? Where does the ash go ? Sprinkling it on a road ? Iron is good for the garden .
Ha. I wondered what good "hardware cloth" might be, sounded more like Muslin, or material for polishing silver. But no, its wire screening. This stove (Jotul f400) has an ash pan under, so in order to get the ash away, it first needs to drop through its grate above, which works well until a selection of old iron begins to block it. The debris includes hand made wrought iron nails, which were blacksmith made and are tapered on all four sides towards point, some of which are just the right size to drop nearly all the way through grate, but not quite. Point down , these block the ash pan from being withdrawn from under and soon accumulate more above. They are simple enough to get out from above, but have to be fiddled out with a poker and tongs. It seems some of these are of interest to collectors, being perhaps 100 years old and at the end of their third or forth or job in life, and the ash above is hot. If poker was magnetic, voila. I have a fishing magnet, but its too much of a good thing on its own, and it does not seem to be useful for magnetising poker. I don't have a huge amount of this wood, perhaps sufficient for six weeks or so, but this problem has occurred before some years ago, when I had a run of old piano's and green houses, but then the stove I used had no grate or ash solution, so no problem. Pianos were from a piano smashing contest......surprisingly robust ! (String tensioning pegs, with a ratchet were death to a chain, or an axe ) Competitors, usually team of three or four 18- 25 yo had to get whole thing through a 10'' x 3'' "letter box'' cut in a steel sheet, against the clock. Most of these lads were from an Agricultural background, and it was normal to stage event close, or next to beer tent so times varied a fair bit. As I remember it, your piano had to be playable on arrival (usually in a pickup, with..er.....player... seated and with music). Health and safety man either did not yet exist then or was in the Bar, I do not recall. I was mainly involved with upright piano's as they were often free to collector, were more easily kept dry and "weakened " in advance. Also, grand and baby grand's (containing more wire) were dealt with further from the beer. I would be surprised if this sort of entertainment occurs today however....in our more enlightened society. My ash goes out to veg garden, or down to woods. And yes, a big old dead ash tree is way preferable !
I gutted a piano once to make a Halloween prop, hardest work I ever done. Those things are heavy and solid. As far as a magnet just use one of the high power pick up magnets and when you get it out give it a shake and the nail will fall off or set it aside to cool then remove nail
So if you want to go the 'total cheapskate' route like I did, retrieve a magnet out of an old defective discarded hard drive from a computer. And who doesn't have an old C: drive laying around, right? Since you're inside the hard drive anyway, may as well bend or otherwise warp the platter(s) that contain the actual data. I like using a BFH. Doing so is oddly satisfying.
If you use a magnet from a set of brakes off of a trailer, they are electrically controlled. Thus you can hook it to a lawn mower battery and either unplug a cord and it will release or wire in a switch. Then it can be off or on. Would make for cleaner hands.
Wrap the magnet in some metal screen, fish out the offending items, pull screen from magnet and items fall away. Repeat as necessary.
Well well. I never knew there was a magnet in a hard drive. Mind you, I never looked inside one......standard procedure in this household for defective / troublesome small electrical items has been, untill now .....into stove and fro there into trash. Works well for telephone answering machines that fail, cordless phones etc.....I doubt there would be any retrievable info left whatsoever. Sounds good to me, I will take a close look inside the next one available. Never seen a trailer with electric brakes here, never heard of such a thing either.....must be getting behind the times in the UK. I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone burning less suitable firewood from time to time.....I just do not like scattering metallic debris around anywhere at all.....sooner or later it'll be in a tyre, or I will hit it with a saw, or lie on it for some reason. Hard drive, looking for a hard drive.......
Those speaker magnets lead me to when I was a kid. Near our home was a TV repair shop that replaced a lot of those speakers (standard 8 or 9 inch) which discarded old speakers I retrieved from their trash. Figured out how to pop the magnets from the speakers and stacked ‘em (ya know, north-to-south etc) and had a nice 10” long stack which makes them stronger. We discovered this magnet stick would warp the picture on the old glass CRT picture tubes. Had fun doing that but then warped the picture on our neighbor’s COLOR TV. Whooh boy - dumb mistake. It magnetized the metal mask, causing color screw up on a part of the screen! They were really mad and had to hire a TV repairman out to their house (all he did was ‘degauss’ the screen). This stupid thing was the start of my electronics career.
