Sounds like a job that needs to be followed by a shower When I lived in Germany the sweep worked from the top down, the houses all had a coke fired boiler in the basement and the soot was swept down into the boiler. The sweep would walk along the ridge to do both houses without moving his ladder. The coke delivery was great entertainment for a small boy. Half of the boiler room was the coke store which could take about 5m3 of coke, the partition had removable boards to access the coke as you used it up and if you forgot to replace them when the delivery arrived you would have coke everywhere. The delivery was by a lorry with a conveyor from the hoppers and a set of chutes were arranged across the front lawn to the basement flap, delivery was done in a few minutes including the chute setup. The other mistake was to not remember to close all the doors to the basement unless you like dusting. Most of the basement flaps were left unlocked so being a handy small boy I was sent down the chute to undo the front door of people who were locked out, great fun as normally sliding down the chute did not go down well with mother as you did get filthy.

Mike

I have come across some scary home brewed machines on YouTube for splitting logs, in the videos people appear to a complete set of fingers but it must be just a matter of time when they will need to count in base 9 or less.

Mike

My last house had a wood burner & the wife & I (well she did!!) decided the chimney needed cleaning. As a builder I regularly had to clean chimneys of refurbished houses so had a brush. To rod drains I had a 100M length of black underground plastic water pipe to which I had fitted a screw fitting for a plunger. This also fitted the brush.

So after suitable covering furniture, the wife & I started sweeping. My house had a flue with a number of turns & was 3 storeys high so needed a lot of shoving. It also needed a lot of pushing to get the brush up the flue. As we all know ,difficult jobs call for lots of swearing between couples.

After a while sweat was pouring off us & there was a knock at the front door.

" Oh! who the b..y hell is that" " Tell them to F off we are busy " etc etc

"ignore it". "You go," " No you go"

Eventually my wife swore, (at me & chimneys in general!!) removed overalls & went to front door

To be met by a chimney sweep brush on the end of a plastic hose.banging on the door. We had not realised that we had shoved so much that the thing had gone up the chimney & back down the outside again !! Being off a roll it curved back in towards the door & was swinging in the wind with the wooden centre hitting the wooden door

Edited By Sam Longley 1 on 09/09/2020 15:34:43

I have somwhere a book written by a sapper just after the first world war. Someone invented a technique of jacking a tube through the clay under the opposing trenches quickly the night before an attack and pushing an explosive charge down it. As it was jacked forward the spoil inside the tube was removed with drain rods then a sweep's brush. The book tells of an operation one moonless night when much laughter was heard from the trenches opposite. Dawn revealed the tube projecting 30 ft in the air in no man's land with a sweep's brush waggling around out of the top.

Edited By Bazyle on 09/09/2020 16:09:43