The oil drum wood stove is installed and working great. I need to do some finishing touches but it is operational. We placed some old bricks we found on the property on the floor and then laid a couple of sheets of concrete board on top of those. I'm also going to get some cinder blocks and stack them up around the sides of the stove. They will supply some heat protection and will also hold the heat very well once they are hot. I need to cut down some more dead trees and buck them up for firewood. You feed whole log sections into this thing, damper it down, and it will burn all night. Thermal mass.



Then Scott went up on the roof and cut a hole for the chimney.



We then needed a piece of sheet metal with a hole for the chimney in the middle. This way keeps the heat from the chimney away from the rest of the roof. I have an ample supply of sheet metal around here. It is in the form of old appliances left here and there on the property. Scott cut a piece out from the front of an old washing machine. Is this redneck or what? Lol!





Got the stove into place and fired up for the first time inside. The wet looking trails running down the chimney were from creosote leaking out the pipe junctions when I was burning it in outside. We rectified that my making a reverser section which you can see at the bottom of the chimney stack.





I'm going to put some more concrete board up between the stove and the closest wall. That stove throws a lot of heat.

The snowmobile was operational for a short period of time yesterday. Unfortunately the new throttle cable got routed incorrectly and got pinched and ruined already. That was the only snafu of the day. We ran out of time to tackle the water bay. That will be another day. You would think that the water situation would have been a priority but it wasn't really. I'm doing fine using 5 gallon jugs of water and the shower at work is great. To be honest I'll probably keep showering at work even after the water system is repaired. It's nice to have long hot showers again without having to worry about how much water I'm using.
My neighbours Jeff and Lori and their daughter came over to look at those tracks. We really don't know what they are from. The snow was pretty soft and whatever it was didn't sink in far enough to be big like a cougar. I'll take a couple of more pics today.