A good friend of ours, Marty Cain, is a stone lover from New Hampshire. She saw the Milliken Heater photos and visited the original Rothschild soapstone heater and decided to build one for her Victorian stable studio conversion. Albie moved several pallets of scrap soapstone in the fall to a staging area behind our back ell and cleared out a wood heated shop space in the basement there. Together with Marty and her friend Ed Monte, Albie cut all of Marty’s stone with the big wet-saw while Ed and Marty measured, chamfered, drilled hook holes, sawed spline kerfs, sanded and polished and numbered every stone.

Marty and Ed did all the trim and polish work outdoors in very cold and sometimes rainy weather and often after dark. It was amazing to see them work.

Marty paid for the cost of an “AlbieCore™” plus firebrick for the heat exchanger and we showed her pre-fabbed core at our annual Common Ground Fair booth. We took the undamaged core back home and then delivered it in our horse trailer to New Hampshire. Albie’s hopes for a fork lift didn’t materialize so we unloaded the 3000 lb. core by hand on rollers down the horse trailer ramp and into place on her slab floor.

Albie, Marty, Ed, Steve Bushway and Joe Baltar all helped set the veneer. The bench stones are a polished mahogany granite from Ed.