STW owners Burrell 4"

I am a novice with a 4" Agricultural. Can an old hand steamer please tell me the best way to clean the chimney after steaming?

Inside or outside?

Inside. I use the tube brush. Open the door to let some light in and run the brush up and down the inside. Watch the blower pipe though.

Outside. Oily rag while the chimney is hot gives a nice shine and protection.

Chimney top. Elbow grease and peak polish when cool.

I've cut a piece of plastic 1.5" waste pipe about 26" long with a sharp angle at one end. With a file/bit of sand paper sharpen the edge of the angled cut. Place a couple of bits of paper towel in the smoke box (when it's cold) and scrape the chimney clean. It all peels off onto the paper with very little sticking to the pipe. A sharpened bamboo cane cleans the fiddley bit around the blast nozzle & blower pipe. Wrap up the paper, job done, hands clean!!

Well how funny to see a post like this.

This weekend I decided to give the inside of my chimney a clean out as it was boiler wash out day and apart from running a wire brush on a stick down inside now and then I'd not done anything else to it for the last couple of years, and recently I had several poor lighting experiences where as 6mths before it had always lit up perfectly, I'd just put it down to poor wood or poor lighting style but I hadnt felt I'd changed anything, I'd also had a few times where I'd struggled to pull back a low fire with low steam for some odd reason.

Anyhow I just removed the 4 bolts holding the base ring plate and removed the whole thing, wow was I surprised at how choked the area was around the blast pipe and blower pipe, almost 50% or more was chocked up with soot and crud. I meant to take some photos

Anyhow I sprayed some paraffin inside the main chimney and left that to soak, then set about scraping all the crud off the area where the chimney bolts to. Once all the big stuff was removed and hoovered out from the smoke box, out came the paraffin again and the whole area got a good spray and soak. Once that had been on there for 1/2hr out came the pressure washer and I gave the inside of the chimney hell, then moved onto the top of the smoke box and the smoke box itself.
10mins later and everything was squeeky clean, chimney bolted back on and we're good to go, be interesting to see how she fires next weekend, it MUST improve the draw now all that junks gone. I shall report back.

Oh its a good idea to lob a bit of rag in the blast pipe to stop anything getting into the cylinder

Makes mental note to do this clean a bit more often now, or atleast pay a bit more attention to that area.

LiveSteam wrote:

............ be interesting to see how she fires next weekend, it MUST improve the draw now all that junks gone. I shall report back.

Well it was like a different animal, hardly surprising really lit up on both days almost without the extension chimney it also was much happier in steam obviously

So one will be paying a lot more attention to ones chimney cleaning regime in the future.