The consumer prices in Japan are skyrocketing these days. As the winter is nearing, the wood pellet fuel has become obnoxiously expensive, and I don’t think I will be able to afford to use my pellet stove (heater) so generously as before for my living room any more.

They say “Needs must when the devil drives”; I bought a used “oil-burning” Aladdin Blue Flame heater, which may sound kind of a betrayal of the ecosystem.

But that’s not the point of this post. I confess I own another Blue Flame heater in my bedroom. I have used it since I was in Hokkaido in the ’90s, so that it’s around me for more than a quarter century. I got it for free from some one, and when it came to my place it was already old. Over time, the plastic parts has become deteriorated, especially the knob dial to raise and lower the wick is badly damaged due to cracking.

Talking about the one that I recently bought via Mercari, an eBay-kinda web marketplace, I found a few defects when it arrived. I started to search replacing parts, and came across a small hardware store’s website which sells Aladdin’s supplies and brand-new / old Blue Flames with very reasonable prices. I was so glad to find out the brick-and-mortar store operating that website is not too far from my place. The owner of the store not only sells the parts but actually fixes the broken Blue Flames by himself.

So I went down to him and bought some necessary parts and got invaluable information and advises. We chatted for quite a while over the repair. He naturally understood my attachment to the Blue Flame which is derived from my memory of the good old Blue Flame heater that my mom bought in the ’60s. And what’s more, to my delight, the owner loves old cars, is knowledgeable in them, and he used to have Italian and other foreign cars.

I bought a knob for my old heater, and placed orders other parts, which he currently carried in stock, of the newly purchased one. The Aladdin company doesn’t produce the knob suitable to my old heater, and I needed to modify it as usual. The modification was nothing special– I just lower the height of the knob so that the adjuster dial could be slid on the rotating axis.

Refer to the caption of each photo in the gallery below:

The following shows how it works: