A Little Cut Here 🔪 And A Lotta Clean There 🧹 Or Vise Versa?

We were home again, and my first project was to cut back the pinch below the driver’s cab to see if we could eliminate the tire rub we were dealing with.

**So Out Came Ye Trusty Cutting Wheel!**

Once I had cut back the pinch weld I kept turning the tire to test it, and as I found more rubbing points continued to cut out trouble spots.

After cutting back a substantial amount of area and smoothing down the edges of my cuts I decided to call it.

I had gained quite a bit of turning ability, but was still running into a rub point further into a turn towards the driver’s side. We were going to need more ability to turn in the future, but where it was at would be do-able for the season.

I placed a call up to Nick and discussed things with him, and we decided that if it was okay for now, we were going to play with putting air-bags in the front to lift it up a bit and get the clearance we needed in the spring.

So for the time being, I was done cutting.

The next morning I was in my office working on our blog when I noticed a moose hanging outside with her calf.

I decided to snap a few pictures for those of you who don’t get to see moose all of the time. 😉

The next project I had on my list was to see “What was going on with Kalcifer?”

So I began by removing his top.

This was actually pretty exciting, we had always wondered what the inside of Kalcifer was designed like.

Beyond his lid I found a piece of stove gasket rimming the top. Down inside lay the secondary combustion comb.

I proceeded to brush out the inner walls of the stove. Honestly though, it was a pretty efficient stove and the mess was pretty minimal.

Once I had cleaned my way down, I found 2 “L” brackets holding the combustion cone in place…

… so out they came!

This is a picture of after I oiled and cleaned the part, but below the combustion comb lay this finned plate to help promote a cyclone air flow up into the cone.

One I had pulled all of the pieces, I traced the breathing tubes holes (located down the lip pictured below) down and found they went to the bottom of the burn chamber.

So I busted out our little mini vac and went to town, cleaning up everything top to bottom of any ash build-up.

Then I used my air compressor and made sure the breathing tubes were cleared out…

… as well as cleaned up all the parts of ash and debris. After cleaning I oiled and wiped all the internal parts down to help protect them from any future corrosion.

Honestly though, they were in really good shape. Then it was time to put Kalcifer all back together.

Once Kalcifer was back to his proud and ol’ self, all that was left to do was test him. We had a little trip around town planned in the near future, where we would be hanging out in The Ohana and seeing if all this work had paid off. 🔥☺️