Adieu to 'Hippie Burner' airtight stove

 

The famous airtight sheet metal stove

If you dropped into just about any trapper's cabin, ice fishing shanty, hunt cabin, backyard workshop or hunting tent any time in the past century, chances are the wood-burning stove shown above was heating the place. It was the GWM airtight stove, made in Winnipeg.

These stoves, made of lightweight steel, came in several sizes and could heat just about any space.

They were so lightweight that you could easily pack them into float planes, ski planes, canoes, snowmobiles and toboggans. If you got the 20-inch size, or larger, the stove pipe lengths fit handily inside for transport.

And if you didn't have a special cooking stove, the top of the old airtight was big enough for a frying pan and a percolator or tea kettle.

A real bonus was they were cheap like borsch. Imagine getting a wood stove for $60 -$120.

Alas, they are no longer made. The company stopped manufacturing them during the pandemic. What are we all to do now?

How did they get the hippie-burner nickname? Well, back in the day when there were hippies all over the country experimenting with drugs and free love and getting "back to the land," they often chose this model stove for their hippie shacks because they were so cheap. They were totally unprepared for how hot the stoves could get. We're talking red-hot if the draft and pipe dampers were left in the wide open position which could happen if you were passed out or just outside following behind the little animals.

Anyway, not only did the stoves get red hot but also the stove pipe going through the ceiling and ultimately, the roof. These people had no concept of things like clearance to combustibles or insulated chimneys with the result a lot of chip-board shacks and, unfortunately, old log buildings that had been left abandoned went up in flames.

But if you were bush-wise, the stoves could be operated safely and despite their thinness lasted several years before they would get burned out and would need replaced.

At our former hunting and fishing lodge west of Red Lake, these airtight stoves heated the cabins for 30 years without incident. I replaced them with more substantial heavy steel stoves with glass doors when Brenda and I took over Bow Narrows Camp from my father, Don, in about 1996 or so.

When we began building the "Dockhouse" at our current cabin site, I bought the 22-inch model shown in the photo to heat the 12x24 building. This was the year before the pandemic. Turns out that stove was one of the last ever made. We never used it. The dockhouse was going to become a two-bedroom guest cabin when our bigger place was finished and locating the stove in a 12x12 space that was going to have a king-size bed in it became problematic. So we opted for a small propane wall furnace for this place instead. 

Then we finished the big cabin last year and installed a high-efficiency Drolet Savannah model stove with a glass door. So the airtight became surplus. I sold it on Kijiji this fall, along with its stove pipe and damper for $100. It sold immediately.

Inside view shows legs and heat shield

Happy New Year! 

Here's a posting I made on my old blog about New Year's Resolutions for Fishermen.

I hope you enjoy it.