“Tim, I smell smoke!” my gal, Cindy, rasped the other day. “I’m getting a headache. Can’t you do something about that stupid wood stove?”
“What are you talk-hak-kaf-ing about,” I replied. “I can’t smell a thing. And I can’t believe your hyper-sensitive nose can either. Hey, don’t run away when I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
“I’m not running away. I’m standing right here, five feet from your face. You might be able to see me if the smoke wasn’t so thick.”
“Well, a small puff happened to escape when I put in a log just now. Probably clear –hak- up in a few –kaf- minutes.”
Cindy didn’t think so and went around throwing open every door and window in the place.
“You’re letting all the warm air out!” I cried. “And the arctic air in. You’re defeating the whole purpose of the wood stove!”
“Right now I wouldn’t care if a blizzard blew through as long as it brought some fresh air with it. This place smells like an ashtray.”
At that point I knew I had a problem. My gal is warm-blooded if ever a gal was. Any temperature below 74 sends her into a shiver. Which really gripes me because winters here in the northwest get cold. And to maintain 74-degrees in our house takes tremendous energy. Energy costs money, which, by my nature, I am generally opposed to spending.
As a last-ditch effort I tried the old martyr ploy. “You, know,” I said, “if you can’t take a little smoke, maybe we shouldn’t use the wood stove at all. Heck, the old ranch house I grew up in didn’t even have a heater, nor insulation. In the winter, we just put on an extra pair of socks. Yeah it was cold, but we were tough. You get used to icicles and numbness after a while.”
She didn’t flinch and countered, “The house I grew up in had a heater and my parents weren’t too cheap to use it. Our house here, it has a heater too – hot water tubes in the floor that cost us a bundle to put in. The thermostat over there on the wall? It works. And I’m not afraid to crank it up!”
So much for that. She had me over a barrel. “Oh, all right,” I said. “I think I know why the stove is smoking. I noticed the other day that I can’t see daylight through the pipe’s rain cap any more. Maybe it’s plugged a little. Probably time I cleaned it.”
I didn’t bother telling her that a properly maintained chimney should be cleaned yearly. Nor did I reminder her of my buddy, Ole VanStruedel, who, like me, neglected to clean his wood stove pipe one year. A layer of creosote, which is combustible, built up in it. He came home one day to a pile of smoldering ash where his house used to be. Chimney fire. But worse than Ole, I’d neglected to clean our stovepipe each of the past five years.
“You?” Cindy asked. “You’re going to climb up our steep roof? Hon, that’s dangerous. Why don’t you call a chimney sweep?”
Yes! The martyr points were rolling in.
“Ohhh no,” I said in a tone intended to elicit maximum guilt, “that would cost money and we’re in this recession. No, I’ll just rig a ladder and do it myself.”
I held firm to her crying and blubbering about how I might fall off and break my back and not be able to work or throw the baseball to our sons any more. Women can be such worry warts.
Saturday morning I walked onto the deck and looked up the 12 and 12 pitched roof at the stovepipe. (12 and 12 pitch equals 45-degrees. To convert, you take the inverse tangent of the quotient. Tan-1(12/12) = 45-degrees. Cool.) I’ve done some roofing in my day, but never anything over 5 and 12 (22-degrees). You can walk reasonably safely on a 5 and 12 roof but at the end of the day your ankles hurt. At 6 and 12, walking gets dicey. At 10 and 12, you crawl, all the while praying there are no rogue patches of sawdust or other lubricants on the surface. If you slip on a 10 and 12 roof you might be able to stop yourself before tumbling over the edge, but probably not. And at 12 and 12, you’re a water drop on a tilted, red-hot skillet.
The pipe exited the roof near the peak, three stories above ground level. But, should a highly improbable fall occur, I wouldn’t plummet the entire three stories. The deck, about half-way down, would stop me. Broken arms, maybe a leg, at the worst. The risk was acceptable so the question became how to rig a ladder.
After a good deal of head scratching, I devised the perfect plan. I have some 6-foot-long, 2×12 ramps I use to load motorcycles and quads into pick up trucks. They have 2×4 cleats, kind of like ladder rungs nailed at about 15-inch spacing on the down side. Laid upside down on the roof, they would make a perfect ladder.
The next problem was how to secure the low end of my make-shift ladder to the roof. I didn’t trust the rain gutter to hold it and I didn’t’ want to pound nails through the shingles, so I had to get creative. As luck would have it, the stove pipe is located directly between two dormers. I was able to rig a 2×4 cross-brace between them which acted as a base on which my ladder rig would bear. Of course I used screws into the trim, not nails. Nails can pull out.
After about an hour I had my ramp in place. Unfortunately, it reached a good two-feet shy of the pipe. The pipe projects up about five-feet vertically, so if I were to stand on the top rung of my ramp, not only would I have to lean considerably to even touch the pipe, with the slope factored in, I’d still be a foot too low to really get at the rain cap. This meant I needed to rig up a second ramp.
But there was a slight problem. My first ramp pointed directly at the pipe so if I were to continue with the second, it, being 6-feet long, would crash into the pipe. A dumb person might think, just cut the 2nd ramp to fit. Pshaw. No respectable shade-tree carpenter cuts a perfectly good ramp. No, I would instead rig an offset.
Down came the first ramp and to the garage I went. Half-an-hour later I emerged, smiling, carrying the first ramp with an offset 2×4 projecting 12-inches sideways from the top rung. The second ramp would bear on this and extend 3-feet past the pipe. Of course, being a structural engineer, I made sure the offset was plenty strong. And I also braced the bottom of the first ramp to the dormer to keep it from slipping sideways from the applied moment (a torquing force) resulting from my weight on the offset. How would a non-engineer ever know to do that? I mused. A guy could get hurt if he didn’t know what he was doing.
Another half-hour later I had the rig on the roof, ready to go. Carefully, slowly, I crept up onto the lower ramp. Checking my jugular vein, I was relieved that the earthquake I thought I’d felt was only my heart. In a crawling attitude, I inched my way up. After one rung it became apparent that my 20-year-old ramp was warped. Badly. As I eased forward, it teetered alarmingly under my weight. I fought back visions of myself tumbling, the contents of my tool belt spraying over the countryside, down the roof.
I performed a quick statics calculation concerning friction and stability of a platform resting on a 45-degree-angled plane. At what angle would the platform become unstable and launch backward? Why did my 175 pounds feel like it was poised to fling into space in violation of gravity? How high would I bounce when I hit the deck?
I heard a door open and then footsteps. Gaaa, my wife! Suddenly, shrieking and crying filled the air.
“What in the heck are you doing?” She asked calmly, shielding the sun with a hand.
“Oh, not much,” I said, striving valiantly to conceal my mounting terror. “Just on my way up the roof to clean the rain cap.”
“Oh. What’s with all the shrieking and crying? You could lose your balance.”
“That? Shucks… just crowing about how exhilarating it is to be on top of the world!”
“Unh, okay. But be careful, hunh? The boys still need someone to throw BP to them, ha ha. And also, you wouldn’t want to encourage those birds up there.”
I craned my neck upward. A couple of dark shapes plied circles in the sky directly over me. Buzzards! Cripes! “Yeah, ha ha. Don’t worry – I’m good.”
End of Part 1.
