wood stove log grate

[Frank S]

the grate in my wood stove has several years of some really hot fires burned over it.
So before this season starts up I thought it better to make a new one as you can see from the picture it was past time
I made the new one out of 5/8" sucker rod and 1" sucker rod with a few more bars, for no particular reason other than I sometimes felt the coals fell through a little early

[DIYer]

Thanks Frank S! We've added your Wood Stove Log Grate to our Heating and Cooling category,
as well as to your builder page: Frank S's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

Wood Stove Log Grate by Frank S

tags: stove

[rlm98253]

Having spent 17 years in the oil fields of West Texas, I am probably one of only a few in the audience who knows what a sucker rod is.

[Frank S]

Having spent 17 years in the oil fields of West Texas, I am probably one of only a few in the audience who knows what a sucker rod is.

OH I imagine there are quite a few on these forums who have a pretty good idea what sucker rod is, I talk about using them enough.
My first real encounter with sucker rod was on a Wilson single gin pole pulling unit pulled 1 rod length at a time then lay it down and get the next. Some worm hand had screwed up causing them to drop the string. The blacksmith shop where I worked got a call needing a welder so William took me along to give him a hand I was all of around 12 or 13 at the time we drove from Spring town to Megargel once there we set up and made an overshot fishing tool for them They caught the string 6 rods down on their first try so everyone had to turn a holiday into a get it done. later I made my first pair of duck bill tongs out of the screwed up rod.
Many years later I found myself designing and building drill rigs then had to chase them to add up grades often found myself and my helper the only ones on the rig who knew anything about it. after the owner's hands had wobbled so Ron and I and the owner wound up drilling a 1500 ft hole by our selves a lot of work considering that Toby the owner had never worked the floor or drilled in his life

[CanBeDone]

the grate in my wood stove has several years of some really hot fires burned over it.
So before this season starts up I thought it better to make a new one as you can see from the picture it was past time
I made the new one out of 5/8" sucker rod and 1" sucker rod with a few more bars, for no particular reason other than I sometimes felt the coals fell through a little early

Poor material choice: What you want to use is a steel with high temperature oxidation resistance, i.e. one that contains tons of chromium and aluminum, as only these elements form oxides that do not easily peel off. As per https://www.enpropipe.com/sucker-rod/, sucker rod is a high tensile, but otherwise plain carbon steel with just enough alloys added to allow it to be heat treated, with next to nothing in chromium or aluminum. Next time, try to get some stainless steel - it's going to eventually fail, but nowhere as quickly as the carbon steel you have chosen. At the temperatures your grate is going to experience, that heat treatment is going to be forgotten the first time you light a fire on it. After all, you'll want a smokeless, efficient fire, and that means temperatures of 800-1000 Celsius, not the paltry 400 Celsius or so up to which SAE 4130 and colleagues can maintain their heat treatment.
When heating to 1000 Celsius, steel bar changes its length by roughly 1%. Since this heating is not uniform, this thermal expansion produces high stresses inside the grate, which, it not balanced by generous use of stiffeners, will lead to serious deformation over time - as your old grate demonstrates. On the new grate, I would have added at least one more, better two, pieces of the 1" rod for stiffness, just to be on the safe side and keep far away from the regime where Euler buckling commences. As a rule of thumb, try to keep the openings in your grate as close to circles / squares as possible.

[mklotz]

Having spent 17 years in the oil fields of West Texas, I am probably one of only a few in the audience who knows what a sucker rod is.

But this is the age of the internet, and it knows all.

Wikipedia even has an entire article devoted to it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_rod

and Google images will provide lots of pictures of the item.

[Frank S]

But this is the age of the internet, and it knows all.

Wikipedia even has an entire article devoted to it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_rod

and Google images will provide lots of pictures of the item.

Yes and this will tell why I so frequently use them in making things
the grades of steel in them even the lowest grade makes them Ideal to repurpose for many things
Finding 1 of the higher grades is an added plus
https://petrowiki.org/Sucker_rods

[jdurand]

Here's a stove grate I made, a helper showed up so I named it "chicken on the BBQ"

[Frank S]

Here's a stove grate I made, a helper showed up so I named it "chicken on the BBQ"

build a fire under it and call it charred chuk

[Jon]

https://petrowiki.org/Sucker_rods

This is an interesting wiki, that also runs on MediaWiki, the free software that Wikipedia uses. MediaWiki is easy to install, extremely well developed and robust, and once you learn the wiki syntax, you can breeze through making and organizing pages.