Rebuilding a Woodburning stove.

My extended family have a cottage in Snowdonia that has a woodburning stove in it. The stove is a (Coalbrookdale?) Much Wenlock, with the brass fittings, like here:
http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/OQ0AAOSwnipWUHvK/s-l300.jpg

The stove is coming apart, the front plate has fallen away to leave a 1cm gap at the front. The top plate has lifted too, and the door won’t open freely because it now snags on the ash shelf. The firebricks are falling away too. All in all it is in a very sorry state and gets treated as an open fire rather than a stove. There are CO and smoke alarms present and they do not detect any problems.

I have no pics, I’m at the other end of Wales, but I’d like to rebuild the stove if possible. I’ve never done something like this before but have turned my hand to most DIY, inc engines, MTB suspension, hydraulics etc- I consider myself a pretty competent kind of guy.
The property is let on a commercial basis.

Your thoughts please.

I would not expect the cast iron to deform so much as to create the gaps you mention, more that any retaining pins or bolts had corroded, failed, and fallen away. I don’t see any reason that the whole stove could not be dismantled and rebuilt as good as new replacing fixings as you go.

But you’d have to do it onsite.

Probably need to get hold of new fire rope and cement to make the flue and door joints good as well.

That’s pretty much what I thought. I’ll just load up the car with all my tools and head north. I’m unable to find a decent exploded diagram/ manual so ordering spare parts beforehand is going to be a faff.

Any idea how the stove is held together? Studs? Glue? Thread? Chewing gum? Magic? I seem to remember some kind of a threaded object.

Will Mr Hetas need to call around afterwards?

Havbing just rebuilt a franco belge belfort, including taking the top off and refitting, if the cast plates are intact its not so hard. That is a big if. I’m not as confident as stoner. To me it sonds like its been run hard, too hard….on coal…house coal? COal buns hot and its very possible to crack and warp cast plates of a stove. If they are intact though then biggest problem i had was freeing a couple of bolts but a day of soaking in wd40 got them. cleaning out old rope and fire cement and re fitting was easy.

can you still get spares for that model? How’s the grate? tht offten suffers if a stove is run too hot, as does the baffle. I had to replace both.

I don’t know if I can get spares, that’s the problem. Grate will be easy to get I’m sure but other bits I’m uncertain about. The glass is OK though, phew, it’s a fragile and expensive part. Rope and cement is not a problem.

I had an ornate Norwegian stove with numerous flues, box sections and doors which was simply lugged together and sealed with fire cement. It stood more than six feet tall. You might get lucky. My guess is that modern stoves may be jointed top to bottom with threaded rods as they will have been fully assembled before leaving their factory where mine must have been ‘flatpacked’

NN has it, above. My neighbour was burning coal and had a chimney fire, the resulting updraft caused the coal to burn white hot like an out of control nuclear reactor and melted the cast iron baffle plate inside her stove, which sagged into the grate then set solid making removal very difficult.

Can’t help Ambrose, but this is why I like welded steel stoves which will not fall apart.

Anyway, found a parts diagram for you.

The fire bricks will be easy to swap but the bigger issues are the sagging door/front plate which seem to have dropped away from the ‘dry shell’. Big question is how the front plate attaches to the dry shell.

Ideally you’d remove it from the house and take it home to be dismantled, cleaned, repaired and resprayed. But I guess you’d need to do this stuff on site.
Hopefully that dry shell is still intact, if not you may be in for a bigger job than it’s worth.

Edit: just seen this…

The property is let on a commercial basis.

Bin (sell it on eBay) and get a steel one. A stove in a rented property will get abused and a cast one is more liable to damage under these circumstances in my view

I’m not sure steel stoves are stronger. They definitely aren’t immune to damage at least. Run them too hot and they will warp and welds crack. With either type, once a problem starts it lets air in, the stove can’t be controlled, burns HOT more and soon the stove is wrecked.

IMO coal is more problematic as wood burns away so much faster the stove isn’t super hot for long, unless it’s being reloaded very frequently. So maybe keep wood at the property not coal.

If it is repairable and you want to repaint it, the best stove paint is Calfire stovebrite. An aerosol should do a stove. Clean it well first, wire brush, then cellulose thinners, don’t use white spirit or anything petroleum based, the paint won’t stick.

As for hetas after the event…. Hetas is a scheme to self certify, a hetas registered engineer couldn’t legally sign off your work. However if the stove isnt changed I believe nothing would be needed. If you change the stove it needs building regs sign off. If you do manage to repair you’ll want to do an integrity smoke test and draw smoke test though, both very simple.

Run them too hot and they will warp and welds crack.

Never said they were stronger. They can potentially warp if you superheat them for a long period, but they won’t crack unlike cast and the likelyhood of a weld cracking is miniscule as this can only happen at temperatures over 1000f.