Albie’s Corner

In June of this year, Albie Barden of Maine Wood Heat and Ryan Neidhold of Vermont, traveled to Harvard, Massachusetts to install a model 83 Le Panyol turnkey oven with a stainless steel base pan and copper dome. Scott Barden and Brock Harmon in our shop re-cut and trimmed and dry stacked and numbered all the standard model 83 Le Panyol pieces for ...

How commercial boiler parts found in a snow bank transformed our traditional view of chimney lining products and their applications.

Albie started thinking about using large clay flue tiles as the outer skin of a lower cost masonry heater about l0-l5 years ago. It all began when he saw a line of twenty or so 500 pound round two foot tall, thirty six inch inside diameter and 3″ thick tile, laying in a deep snow bank beside the road in Madison, ...

This was an excellent question asked recently by one of our mobile oven clients. Excellent questions deserve thorough answers, so our very own Albie Barden stepped up to the plate on this one…

For the past ten years, we have been importing Le Panyol wood fired ovens from France. The wood fired ovens ...

Bob and Lynn Thurrell bought an old center chimney cape farmhouse and land in Pownal, Maine a generation ago. The house was a wreck when they got it and Bob worked feverishly to make it habitable for their first winter. They made it through with a wood stove and lots and lots of blankets, but the house took a long time ...

The original and Northern most entrance to Yellowstone Park is located in Gardiner, Montana beside the Yellowstone River. Marking the entrance is a huge brown basalt stone arch standing like a gateway, minus the walls, to an ancient city of fortress. The corners of the gateway are made of large squared block (quoins) but all the infill blocks have points on them like dinosaur armor. As a stone mason, I noticed, but really didn’t understand this detail when we drove ...

John Stacy and Shirl Ireland met me after dark at the Bozeman, Montana airport to drive me to their home in Gardiner, Montana for the recent masonry heater workshop we held there in October of 2010. Getting all the cardinal directions clear in the dark and seeing where we were was difficult because, as usual, I hadn’t carefully studied any maps before this long awaited trip. Driving up the Paradise Valley towards Gardiner we kept a steady lookout for elk ...

Our old friend of over thirty years, Heikki Hyytiainen, came to Wild Acres this year in Little Switzerland as a speaker and presenter at the annual Masonry Heater Association retreat. Heikki was our first significant contact in Europe who graciously introduced Doug Wood and Albie Barden to the world of Finnish Contraflow heaters in the winter of 1979. In the spring of 1979, ...

When Sampsa first contacted me about building a masonry heater in a hands-on workshop, he already had drawings for a custom-made soapstone fireplace with an adjacent oven designed by Tulikivi in Finland. Working off these drawings and measures from Sampsa of available brick and firebrick near his home in New Zealand, I started to do scale drawings of a similar layout to the soapstone complex, ...

In America, the first wood heating devices in the historic era were large open fireplaces. To this were added wood fired ovens, some on the back wall of the fireplace and some to the side of the fireplace. In the middle to late eighteen hundreds cast iron cookstoves were invented. The classic six-lid cookstove could have one or both lids plus the divider over the firebox removed and stepped cast iron pots and griddles could be placed tightly but directly ...

One of the great masonry heater designers and researchers of the mid twentieth century was a Finnish researcher named Asp. When I (Albie) began my journeys to Finland in the late seventies, my Helsinki, Finland friend, Heikki Hyytiainen, made mention of Asp’s work and we were able to find one of his books in Finnish which I now have. Among other things, Asp did a lot of work with the introduction of what masonry heater and stove designers have often called ...