Sailor's Horn Pipe

This is an odd bit of hardware we found lurking in the kitchen wall.

Kathy calls it Captain Cook's Stovepipe and we think it's part of a boiler flue or vent. It's up high on the wall of the ground floor, and weighs a ton. It looks like simple galvanized metal tubing in the photo, but that's actually covering a very thick and heavy ceramic pipe inside. The inside wall of the ceramic pipe was pretty dirty and sooty, suggesting that it was the flue from a wood- or coal-burning boiler or furnace.

This big ugly thing was mounted up high, as you can see. It makes a 90-degree bend, pointing up (to the second floor) and sideways (into the ground-floor kitchen). Our guess is that the boiler/furnace was installed where the ladies' room is now, and it vented over the kitchen ceiling to the outside.

I thought it'd be easy to remove -- it's just a bit of sheet metal, right? -- but that was before I got up on the ladder. My first clue was the quarter-inch steel plate holding it up. And the six-inch nails holding that in. And the fact the nails were spaced just an inch apart. And the doubled studs. Hmmm, maybe this thing needs a lot of bracing...

Anyway, down it came. It's going in the "weird stuff" box in the garage where we keep everything that's historically or architecturally interesting. We're up to several boxes now. We'll need another house to store all the house stuff!