Pot stove guard

When we moved into the house the kitchen had a pot stove in the fireplace where there had probably been a small cooking range. It's nice enough decoratively but as the chimney is functional I spent some time sorting out the register plate in the fireplace and getting our local sweep to come in and clean out the chimney. He told us that the lining of the chimney had decayed and that we should have it replaced or a stainless steel liner fitted.

As the roof on this part of the house required replacement we had the roofer drop a liner down the chimney at the same time as it was being re-roofed. A bit more time was spent converting the register plate into a closure plate. Basically this meant fitting a hit-and-miss vent to stop any moisture building up in the now enclosed space between the liner and the chimney walls.

Now the thing was ready to fire again, and was a few times, but I just couldn't rely on one of the Tykes not running into it while it was hot (and still can't even as they approach teenage years). The solution was to take the wire cage fireguard from the living room which had outlived its usefulness (as the Tykes are now old enough to know not to mess with that fire) and move it into the kitchen.

The guard had been made in two halves and is about five foot wide and a foot deep, with the centre rising in an arch, The rearrangement was obvious, simply swing the two ends together forming a cage that was longer than it was wide with the open end and the tops of the arched segments at the rear. Then push the reformed cage into the alcove round the stove.

And it even worked; sort of. Unfortunately the stove pipe stopped the two halves of the fireguard from lying next to each other. Meaning that the whole thing was sort of scissored round the stove and pipe, the clips that were supposed to join it together couldn't be used and the whole thing couldn't be fixed in place. Generally a less than satisfactory situation.

After using it like this for a while (read a year or so) I decided that as part of the kitchen MRO process I was going to sort it out. A bit of metalwork was going to be needed, my skills in which haven't advanced since the second year of comprehensive (ie they are still nil).

I decided that I could cut out the corners and flip them over to create the required rebate for the stove pipe. As my spatial reasoning is appalling, out came drinking straws and scissors so I could confirm that if I made the cuts the ends would come back flush to each other. Then it was just a matter of making the measurements for the rebate size needed to fit the guard round the stovepipe and out with the Dremel (with a slight side-step to buy a new tool, a set of cheapo measuring calipers to get an accurate diameter on the stovepipe - these were OK after I had ground the ends square). I used a protractor to mark out the cuts as near as possible to 45^o and made the cuts on the frame wire first to minimise any movement during the cutting process; followed by detaching all of the mesh wires close to their attachment point on the frame wire. After this I ground back the remnant stubs of the mesh wires from the detached frame wire piece and voila! It was able to flip over as required and formed the correct size rebate.

One section of cut fireguard

Only the small matter of how to rejoin the pieces remained. I could glue it but I was pretty sure that a) it wouldn't last and b) the heat from the stove pipe might melt it out the first time the stove was lit.

So a metal joint was probably a better bet. Welding then? A bit of reading lead me to the conclusion that I was going to have to buy a lot of kit and that I had cut the guards the wrong way (the welding process prefers a butt joint to a chamfered one).

The next option was soldering/brazing. I was still going to have to buy some kit, but the joint was cut correctly for these processes at least. For this application there wasn't much to choose between them. The stovepipe gets too hot to touch but is not likely to get hot enough to melt a solder joint. Brazing is stronger but a bit more tricky to get to work. However as I haven't done any brazing before this is what I went with.