When i had a woodstove I tried to burn seasoned wood and mainly oak,locust,hickory and cherry.i was on 2nd shift at the time and would close it up tight early afternoon then in the evenings when my wife and kids would get home they would open it up and get a good fire going before they went to bed then shut it back down.every morning when I got up I would open the draft and let a good hot fire burn again.we did this for years and never had to clean the chimney out it always stayed clean,this was a Ashley but dont remember what. Model.

Growing up, only ever saw one model,and it was common in my area before the advent of the outdoor boiler…and it’s popularity also ran its course.

No you can’t MJM, especially the wood stoves from back in the day. A wood stove needs to be air-tight AND be designed for a secondary burning of the gases before they go up the chimney. There is a difference between throttling down and smoldering. As you mentioned operator error, most certainly but if a stove is designed to run hot and the operator wants & try’s to control the amount of heat output is when they get in trouble with creosote build-up especially using unseasoned wood or trying to burn soft wood like hardwood!

I have to hand it to Ashley as being an older company that is still building stoves and I’m sure have adapted & improved their design for efficiency otherwise they would have disappeared long ago! Back in the day they were a cheap stove that was very affordable so if you had wood and certainly needed to heat the family warm they sold like hotcakes!

In the early 80’s I was building 3 sizes of free-standing wood stoves out of 1/4” steel, lined with fire brick , a movable baffle, and a smaller rolled top section for the reburn. I made the rolled top by splitting a length of 4” pipe and welding it into a “S” shape and offset the top reburn chamber. I sold the larger size for $700 during that time and I had people on a waiting list because the stoves worked so well. My stoves were very attractive, some with glass fronts, all had decorative scrolling I’d made out of polished stainless bar and many of the wives would bring me something they wanted attached to the stove faces and/or tops. I used a Millermatic 100 mig and used a heck of a lot of 25# spools of wire!

I had two different people approach me wanting me to quit Dow and back me to start a full-fledged stove building business. As I said previously, I built 52 stoves for people from Lake Michigan to Saginaw Bay and the stoves sold only by word-of-mouth!!! They were great stoves by golly!

To me every thing you described is operator error. Having a smoldering burn, unseasoned wood, burning soft wood like it is hared wood? If I build a smoldering fire in a stove you built am I going to get a secondary burn?

Not if it’s “smoldering” but my stoves, as most all quality stoves will give a reburn by throttling down but there is a point when you’ll snuff the fire out for lack of air. The Ashley’s of the day were built cheap and not air-tight so in order to throttle down because they were giving too much heat, people smoldered their fires. Because they weren’t air-tight, good seasoned hardwood was difficult to throttle down because of the poor air control was fighting against the stove’s lack of being air-tight.