Jotul 118 Burn Plates

Brian, the side baffle plates serve both to increase the internal temps (dead air space behind them is an insulator) and to protect the sides from the intense heat of the fire. I had the short plates in mine, but placed them in the forward position. They always cracked and warped in the middle at the bottom, so that means to me that the hottest part of the stove was the front third, not the back. The 118 is something like 27" deep, so that's a long way to the back for the air to reach with any velocity. That stove burns from front to back. By the time the back of the fuel charge is burning, there is not enough wood left to cause damage, nor is the air coming in with enough velocity to sustain a powerful burn. Maybe on the shorter 602 the back was a problem area, but in your photo, you can see by where the creosote is built up that the back is much cooler than the front.

One thing that I am curious about is the way your side baffles are mounted. I had a clone, not the real deal. My side plates were hung from hooks that passed through holes in the cast flanges at the top of the sides. This lowered them a good 2" lower than the ones in your photo. In almost 20 years of burning that design, I can say with authority that the front bottom of the stove is by far the hottest spot on the interior. The way yours are hung, I see no protection for the lower sides at all. Probably wise to bank ashes up along the sides at the bottom. I did that with mine for a year or two with side plates badly eroded at the bottom and no damage occurred to the sides.

BeGreen said:

Don't worry, it's probably just fine. That looks like the baffle plate. I'm not sure about the flameout plate, Woodman's has it listed for this stove. I'm trying to identify this part.

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Hi BeGreen, I own a 118 Jotul stov like the one on the pic and I've been looking for weeks for a service manual. Where did you get this diagram from? Do you have any link that I can download it from?

Thanks

BeGreen said:

I'm not sure there is a service manual. Might be worth contacting Woodmans to ask.

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OK, but where does the parts diagram com from?

Battenkiller said:

...

One thing that I am curious about is the way your side baffles are mounted. I had a clone, not the real deal. My side plates were hung from hooks that passed through holes in the cast flanges at the top of the sides. This lowered them a good 2" lower than the ones in your photo. In almost 20 years of burning that design, I can say with authority that the front bottom of the stove is by far the hottest spot on the interior. The way yours are hung, I see no protection for the lower sides at all. Probably wise to bank ashes up along the sides at the bottom. I did that with mine for a year or two with side plates badly eroded at the bottom and no damage occurred to the sides.

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So after reading your post, I decided to swap the side baffles in my 118. The stove is from 1983 (as the dates forged in the parts seem to indicate), it has 3 hooks on both sides but the plates only have 2 holes, so I can hang them at the front or at the back. Until now, they were hang at the back and I moved them to the front hooks.
The stove is heating fine BUT there's something strange happening and I really can't find any logical explanation: The left baffle falls from its hooks. Today was the second time. When it happened last week, I thought I hadn't properly hang the plate so I double checked but today it fell again.
We had a fire yesterday, and the day before and the baffle stayed in place but today for some weird reason it fell again, in the middle of a fire. Also the right baffle seems to be ok, the only one falling is the left one.
Has this happened to someone else before? Does anyone see any rationale? I am really puzzled...

Eric, my hooks were shot when I got the stove, so I put new ones in from the hardware store. I attached them to the plates with small quick-links and used eye bolts to run through the holes in the stove. Can't come off that way, right? Well, sure enough, every two years those eye bolts would straighten out from the heat and I'd have to replace them. Same with the baffle plates, although I never used the proper cast plates, just 1/4" plate from the steel yard with holes drilled in the correct spot. Eventually I blew a hole right through the smoke shelf, and I ran it for a season with steel plate on the top to block the hole. By the next year that was warped badly and needed replacing again, and I thought "WTF... you deserve a better (bigger) stove."

It's a very intense little burner and burning it hot takes its toll on the small parts, but I always thought it was worth the effort. If I had that stove upstairs I would never have had to get a bigger stove, but from the basement install the Vigilant just puts out way more heat. 4-6 degrees warmer around the clock in the upstairs living area. I was getting old, and the cold bothered me more than it used to. I gave the stove away to some guy for his workshop (he's there all the time to watch it), and last I heard the guy's still heating his shop with it.