What you see in the picture is, of course, a solid-fuel stove. It came to be because early this year I found myself labouring on at a tree-felling job, and I finished up being offered as much split firewood as I could make off with. As long as I did the splitting. I'd been pondering switching to solid fuel for a while, but I regard open fires as inefficient, messy and rather hazardous. What I wanted was a stove, but stoves these days are priced well beyond my means (having said that, I have subsequently acquired a bag of iron bits that, according to the little old guy who sold it me for a fiver at his shed sale, will assemble into a stove, with a "bit" of fixing up).

Having abundant supplies of fuel at hand focussed my thinking on the matter, and I discussed the matter with a few people. I must credit my brother with coming up with the solution. We'd been aware for some time of a kit of parts that you can buy to convert a steel oil drum into a stove. This kit consists of a set of legs, a door and a flange that fits to a stovepipe, all of which you bolt on to your oil drum. Great for a workshop, but the finished assembly isn't the sort of thing you'd want in your front room, plus, oil drums are made of thin material - it won't last for long as a stove. My brother's plan was simple - to bolt the kit on to something the same shape and size as an oil drum, but made out of something much more substantial. Even better, he'd spotted the very thing - an old air compressor. We paid a quick visit to the mechanics works that it was lying outside, and obtained the whole thing for twenty quid. Plus the help of the owner in loading it onto our trailer - which was useful, because this thing was extremely heavy.

Back at our workshop, we took a large angle grinder and with much noise and sparks chopped the air-tank in half. (The plan is we each get a stove out of this!) Here's what it looked like at this stage:

Not very pretty at all. The steel is good and thick - about 10mm. It took quite a bit of cutting.

At this stage, I decided that I wanted to do something better than the door supplied with the oil-drum kit. I wanted glass in it, like the "proper" stoves have. Unfortunately, a trip to the stove spares shop and a good poring over e-bay later, it became clear that a commercially produced door was going to be out of my budget. So I decided to make my own.

Out with the angle grinder again, I started cutting up sheets of 6mm steel to make the face of the stove and my door. Also deployed was an electric sabre saw, but a lot of the work was done manually with a hacksaw. You run a serious risk of getting fit on this solid-fuel business, what with all the sawing, wood chopping and weight lifting.

I obtained a piece of heat-resistant glass from the same old chap with the shed-sale, and then set about the various steel bits to finalise the shape of the door and cut the slots for the air-admittance system (aka damper) at the front. I invested, wisely it turns out, in a couple of high-end Swiss hand-files for this - there were serious amounts of steel to be removed. For those who don't know, files come in three grades, namely fine, second-cut and bastard. I opted for the latter, because it's a great excuse for puerile humour. "Pass me that bastard would you", "I need a bastard handle" etc etc.

On with the job! Next up I got to play with the lathe to make a pair of basic hinges, and use some taps to cut threads where it all fastens together. I spent some time engineering up a secondary air-inlet system too (the pipe you can just make out leading down from the top into the centre of the stove) Then it was a matter of welding it all together. Luckily, my excellent brother has a large and powerful MIG welder that's big enough - just about - to handle this gauge of steel.

Job done! A bit of black-lead polish from e-bay (2 quid), after a good rubbing down and the bastard son's looking the part. But there was still more to do. First off, transport to my gaff from the workshop - a bit more weight-lifting.

A bigger problem was that my house wasn't quite ready to accept a stove. There was no chimney pot on top of the stack, a nasty gas-fire with a metal flue up the chimney, and the hearth wasn't really up to the job either.

Back to work. I ripped out the old gas fire and concreted in a big old flag to make a sturdy hearth. Luckily for me whoever had put in the gas fire and removed the chimney pot had kept the pot as a garden "feature" - a quick washing and it was ready to go back to its original role in life. Next was a quick mission onto the roof. One of the top three causes of DIY-related accidents is IIRC falling from ladders, so I went carefully, but apart from some tricky moments climbing from ladder to roof with a weighty pot over my shoulder all went well. The gas flue was ripped out - it's like a giant corrugated metal snake - and hurled from the roof-top, and the pot was cemented into pride of place.

Back indoors, the bastard son was heaved into position, a bit of stove-pipe installed on top, and an old shelf was modified and installed to serve as a "register plate" - a thin metal sheet quite rightly required by building regs to block off the bottom of the chimney, so that less heat is lost up the chimney.

The job was truly complete! A toasty warm solid-fuel stove installed in my gaff just in time for the August heat-wave!

Now for some notes on the environmental and economic aspects. I'm burning wood, not coal, this is important. The wood comes at the moment from two sources - logs from felled trees, and kindling wood that I've split up from a great quantity of old pallets that a local warehouse was pleased to let me take.

Some people might be surprised at me claiming that the cutting down of trees is an environmentally good act, but it is really so. One of the big issues in environmentalism today is carbon and the carbon cycle. Carbon is very common in nature and in all living things. It's also common in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide gas. Unfortunately high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause problems - potentially, climate change. When we take some carbon-based thing that has once been living - wood or coal or oil or gas, and burn it, we get out the energy we're after, but also convert the carbon in the fuel into carbon dioxide. That's bad.

The good news is, there's something that'll take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere - trees. Actually all green plants do this trick, but trees are the champions at it. The process is called photosynthesis, as I'm sure we're all aware.

So, what we have is a nice, neat carbon cycle. Mike chops down tree, burns wood, releases energy to warm himself. Carbon dioxide released into the air. Tree absorbs carbon dioxide, uses energy from sunlight to turn it into wood. Mike chops down tree...

Pay attention to where the energy is coming from and going to in this cycle. What's happening here is that the living tree is functioning as a solar energy device.

Note also that this cycle is sustainable on a scale of the trifling (geologically speaking) 100 years or so it takes a tree to mature. That's why, for environmental reasons, I don't burn coal (there's an economic reason too - wood is effectively free). Coal, oil and gas are the so-called "fossil fuels". They are the remains of dead stuff from getting on for 100 million years ago. The environmental problem with burning these is that they aren't part of the cycle. By burning them we introduce into the picture all this carbon that has been safely locked away for millions of years, and there isn't sustainability. (I imagine there might be a cycle for fossil fuels, but it would be on a geological 100-million year scale. Not the 100-year cycle we get with trees.)

This stuff is what various celebrities (Bono I think, for one) are babbling on about when they talk about "reducing their carbon footprints".

There's talk in the news of "carbon sequestration technology" - this is all about getting carbon back into the ground and out of the atmosphere. Got to be a good idea and I hope it can be made to work.

And the economics? Simple really. I don't have to pay out for heating gas! Or coal for that matter. And Chelsea Football Club? (Sorry you've had to wade through all the preceding to get to this critical bit of information.) Well, a good chunk (getting bigger too) of the gas we burn in the UK comes from Russia, where it makes dodgy business types and out-and-out Mafiosi wealthy, who in turn fund Chelsea FC. Well not from me any more they don't! Ha! (Except for I still use some gas to warm washing water. Bugger. I'll just try to wash less. And shave in cold water.)

I always urge people to look at the cradle-to-grave picture when examining environmental matters, so I'll finish by doing so for this project. The Bastard Son Project does have its environmental down sides. Energy was used in the construction (electrical energy, some of which comes from Russian-gas powered generators). Transport of wood involves burning diesel fuel, environmentally and economically bad again (but this can be mitigated with big loads and thoughtful routing).

I must acknowledge the huge assistance from my brother Waxer during the construction, and from my excellent colleague Jimbo during installation, and thank both for their encouragement throughout the project, even when it seemed that the Bastard Son would turn out distinctly funny-looking, and their help too in various wood-gathering activities.