Regency R5/R7 - Information, Best Practice, Maintenance Questions

[Ctomasek]

First time poster but have been viewing these forums since I purchased my property with a wood stove around 7 years ago.
I have a Small Regency Freestanding R5/R7 Stove on Pedestal Base from 1991 currently installed in a corner of my living room/kitchen heating about 1100 sqft in Muskoka Region, Ontario, Canada.

I am looking for any information, suggestions, maintenance tips from anyone familiar with this unit.

I just recently cleaned the chimney/stove pipe, and did a full clean out of the fire box and noticed some damaged fire brick and gaps in the steel baffle/baffle bricks.
Picture is attached of inside stove box, how worn are these bricks? Would it be advised to replace all of them? The bottom bricks can't be seen in the photo due to ash from last night fire but there are gaps of up to 1cm between bricks and one of them is broken in half, some are no longer perfectly square(the top and bottom face is very rough, almost like a layer has been chipped off)
Also at the top, you can see the steel baffle doesn't extend far enough on the right/left to completely meet the metal frame, I have pushed the right and left bricks as far to the end as possible to keep all heat/gas/flames directed forward under air tube but I can still see draft pulling some flames towards the right and left of steel baffle rather than forward and up. Is this the correct thing to do? I am assuming I want the top to basically be as sealed as possible so all gas flows below the air tube for secondary right?
Because I have pushed the bricks to the left and right, you can see quite a gap on either side of the center small brick on the baffle, is this ok?
I did also try removing the air tube to ensure it was clean inside but it has a small weld on the right side connection and can't be removed, how likely is it that the air tube, air holes at back of box, air wash, and (dog box?) at from bottom could be clogged and reducing airflow?
Next question is regarding fan/blower use. This stove has an AirMate installation and a spot for a blower, because they are so expensive I have been placing a small fan behind stove blowing up the AirMate to push air up and forward through the metal, is this advisable? I also sometimes use a second circulator fan on the stool behind stove to blow up and on the stove pipe to further push hot air throughout my house, does that affect the efficiency by reducing pipe temp?
You can see the top of stove has some rust/paint damage which I once tried to sand with steel wool and made it worse, for some reason I though it was cast iron and not a painted black metal. How would you go about refinishing the stove to make it look nicer? Would stove polish fix this after sanding again, or does it need to be repainted?

If you got this far, thanks for reading! I figured I would try to get all questions out in one thread, if you have any advice/tips for this stove that would be highly appreciated!
I was considering looking at buying a new stove as this one is quite small and can't really be loaded much to burn through the night, do you think it's worth it to restore this stove or look at a more modern efficient option? Ideally I would like a bit of a larger stove for ease of loading a nice box of wood but my home is quite small and don't necessarily need a large stove for heat. Thoughts/recommendations?

 

[Garbanzo62]

I would reach out to Bholler on here. He is a regency dealer and probably could answer off the top of his head.

 

[begreen]

I'd change it out for a larger stove. Some come with a blower. If you can hang on to it until fall you will get the best price.