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I have a similar stove that I installed in my mobile home in about 1977 or 1978. It was specificly for mobile home use and had a metal hearth base that I filled with concrete. The combustion air came in through the bottom and it used Metalbestos chimney from the top of the stove through the roof. The stove worked very well, in general. It kept our electrical bills reasonable and was especially handy when the power went out. I burned many cords of wood in that stove over the years. A couple of times, I forgot to turn down the draft after I had filled the stove with tamarack or pitchy pine. I found the top of the stove substantially red hot and quickly turned down the draft knob. Unfortunately one of those times, the stove top cracked near the chimney fitting. There also had been quite a bit of fire out the top of the chimney. After that I was more careful about getting the fire too hot. But we continued using the stove, as it still worked OK and did not smoke into the house. Time passed, and we finally were able to afford to build a conventional house. We were required to get rid of the mobile home (building permit on the same property and septic) and had a heck of a time selling it. I thought for awhile that I was going to have to pay someone to move it away! But finally a young couple wanted it and I more or less gave it to them for their paying to have it hauled to their property. But as a part of the deal, I decided to keep the stove and chimney. I was worried about liability for the cracked stove. The young man helped me disassemble the chimney and remove the stove. When I had it outside, I discovered that the stove had also cracked the back panel, quite badly. The lowest piece of Metalbestos pipe had almost no liner remaining inside--apparently the heat over the years had eroded the stainless steel. The stove and chimney probably were a real safety hazard and I was glad I didn't let the young family have them. I would have felt terrible if anything bad had happened because they were using that stove setup. The mobile home stove has some metal shrouding that other stoves might not have, and it was the shrouding that prevented me from seeing that the stove back was cracked. I would check the stove over very carefully for cracks and warpage. The door should have a fiberglass gasket. I replaced my stove gasket a couple of times and found that it stayed in place best if I used stove cement. The brick liners will come out, and the stove is a lot easier to move if you remove them. If the brick lining is in poor shape, I would use thicker firebrick rather than trying to cut them down to match the pieces originally used in the stove. I think that it would take a lot of cuts to completely duplicate the factory brickwork. I have thougt about welding up the cracks in the old stove and putting it in my barn that I hope to build in the next couple of years. I would use normal stovepipe near the stove, and would finish the chimney using the good sections of the Metalbestos pipe. Then it wouldn't be all that expensive of a project and good enough for occasional use. Good luck! We always thought that our Earth Stove was a pretty good one, and definitely better than some others we saw.
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