Should I rehab my Woodstock Classic?

When my wife and I moved bought our current home about ten years ago it came with an older Woodstock Classic in the lower level of the house.

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As you can see the air control consists of the small sliding grate on the side door at the bottom. The cat engagement is controlled by a rod that exits the back of the stove. You push or pull on the rod to slide the cat over the round opening seen in the photo. The previous owner told me he never used the cat and just left it in the position you see in the picture. Once I looked over the stove, which was completely new to me (I had never even heard of soapstone woodstoves back then!), I soon figured out why he didn't use the cat. The top plate was warped from overfiring and the rod was binding.

I took the cat assembly apart, straightened out the rod, cleaned the cat, and got the mechanism working again. Even with the warped top plate I can operate the cat with no problems. This past season, after ten more years of burning, I finally had to replace the cat.



It came with a gasket, but since there is nothing in the design to hold it in place it soon came loose once the tape burned off, so I just removed it since it was apparent it wasn't serving any purpose and would soon be flopping down into the opening causing a problem. The new cat works great and the stove burns so clean that I haven't had to clean my clay tile flue a single time in the past decade. Absolutely no ash or creosote build up!

The only part of the stove that is still damaged is the top plate inside the stove that creates a chamber between the inside of the firebox and the plate the cat assembly is mounted on.



As you can see in the photo the back section has eroded away. This allows flames to more easily reach the top plate where the cat is located and probably contributed to the warping of that plate. My question is: would it make any sense to go to the effort and expense of replacing this plate? As I said earlier, the cat moving mechanism works fine and the cat is obviously working fine based on the way the stove burns and how clean my flue stays. If you do think that eroded plate should be replaced, can anyone tell me how difficult a job it would be to remove and replace and give me an idea of the cost, assuming I do it myself?

Thanks for the input Bean. Since I just replaced the cat this past winter and the stove burns fine I think I'll just continue as is for the time being. If you recognize my name you might know that we just bought a new Jotul F600 (I'm sitting next to it in my avatar) this past February. That stove is located in our living room on the upper level of the house where we spend most of our time. I mostly burn the Classic when we get some unusually cold weather, high temperatures staying below freezing and lows in the teens or lower, to help supplement the heat to the upstairs stove. I'll also fire it up when I plan to watch some sports on the big screen TV downstairs and my wife wants to view something else on the living room TV. If the Classic was our main heater I'd be more inclined to max out its performance, but since it does okay for how we use it I'll just monitor things going forward. It's good to know I can probably rehab it without too much expense if I decide to go that route in the future.

After making my initial post here on rehabbing the old Classic it got me thinking that I could do a little "do it yourself" rehabbing to at least restore the eroded Belly Baffle to its original configuration. While out hiking with the dogs this morning I got thinking about it and thought I might be able to use a flattened out section of stove pipe fastened to the underside of the belly baffle to fill in the burnt out opening. Then I remembered that I had a perfect size piece of 6" x 6" cast iron that I cut out of my damper door assembly when I installed my SS liner for my new Jotul stove upstairs. When I got home I brought the slab of cast downstairs and sure enough it was a good fit. I was able to sit the piece on top of the belly baffle and slide it out so that it covered the hole and lined up with the original back edge of the baffle. I then drilled a couple of holes through the patch piece and the belly baffle to secure the piece of cast so it wouldn't shift and possibly block the opening up to the smoke chamber. Here are a couple of photos, but it's a bit hard to see due to the close quarters.



















The second photo is a bit blurred, but it shows how the patch lines up pretty close to the original back edge of the belly baffle. The next photo shows what it looks like from above and how I bolted it in place.





I'll be curious to see if I notice any change in the burning characteristics next season when I fire up the stove again. At the very least it should provide some added life to my cat since flames sometimes made it up through the cat hole opening with my start up fires due to the hole in the belly baffle. I had to delay sliding the cat into place until the flames burned down enough that they would't reach the cat. Now I should be able to fire up the cat sooner. I keep a thermometer on top of the stove over the cat and usually slide it into place when the stove hits around 300 - 350 F.