MEXICO – Fifty years ago, Pete Riley of Mexico earned an award in woodshop class as a junior in high school in Milford, N.H.

It was the only subject in which the Lowell, Mass., native excelled.

“I was damn lucky to get through high school,” he said early Friday afternoon in his basement. “Thank God I had shop class for half the day.”

This fall, relying solely on Yankee ingenuity and decades steeped in the logging, lumbering and trucking industry in southern New Hampshire, Riley built a firewood elevator from scratch inside his house at 7 Colby St.

“I was too lazy to carry the firewood upstairs,” Riley said, explaining why he decided to invent what he calls his “Flintstones rig.”

His good friend of six months, World War II veteran Larry Craig of Rumford, helped with the project.

“I had the young ideas and he had the old ideas,” Riley said of Craig, whom he met and befriended while dining at the Front Porch Cafe off Route 2 in Dixfield.

“I’m never bashful about tackling anything. That’s how you learn,” Riley added.

“The ideas just come to him,” Craig said, standing partially stooped over, bracing his arms and body on crutches that he uses to get around ever since suffering an injury in an accident in California while serving his country as a Marine.

“I think it’s something that he’s so capable of coming up with the ability to think things out and then, he comes to some sort of conclusion. He’s sort of an inventor,” Craig, a Mars Hill native, added.

Riley, a retired woods worker, Christmas tree farmer, and trucker, also suffers from physical ailments, like a bad knee and back from breaking bones earlier in life.

Until this winter, Riley had used oil to heat his home. Due to high prices, however, he returned to his roots and had about six cords worth of logs delivered from Bethel, planning to only use four cords.

“This will be the first year that I’ve burnt wood in almost 30 years,” he said.

With help from a brother and Craig, the men cut and split the wood.

Getting much of it into the basement was the easy part.

“I’d carried a few wheelbarrows of wood in and took it upstairs, and said, ‘Wait a minute. This is stupid,'” Riley said.

A man who loves a challenge, Riley started work on his elevator. He tore out the stairway from basement to sun porch, where a woodstove is located. He next bought two sheets of plywood and some 4-by-4s for the elevator framework, then made two carts to haul the wood, complete with wooden wheels, of course.

A Bethel friend helped with the framework, which looks crooked, but works just fine.

A tinkerer and wood craftsman, Riley also used steel he had on hand, got a hoist from a friend, and bought a shaft for $14 to use as an axle. He cut two oak logs to length to use as lift platform beams, made some metal pipe handles for the carts, and built a three-phase power source.

Using three-phase allows the motor that powers the elevator to run one way to provide lift and in reverse to descend, he said.

“It’s just from things you pick up over the years, and I love building things,” said the man, who in third grade, wrote that he wanted to be either a lion trainer or test pilot when he grew up.

Each cart, which Craig painted, can hold five or six big armfuls of wood. So, getting four cords of wood in for the winter via elevator, Riley figures, is 120 trips or 240 cartloads.

“It works well, that’s the main thing. And, it’s a hell of a lot better than carrying it all upstairs,” Riley added.