One of the biggest challenges? Much of the lining for the firebox was missing.
"Each brick in the box was numbered," he says. "They fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But half of them were gone."
The firebox consists of two pieces, so Steve made a couple of molds.
The transfer piston also presented a problem. The Rider-Ericsson has two pistons in one cylinder. One, though, was rusted and gone. "We have a good sheet metal guy in this area," Steve says. "He formed a new shell for the piston, using 16 gauge sheet metal, and I heli-arced it together. It's just as good as the original."
Other than the piston and the firebox, the rest of the restoration was pretty basic, he says.
"The engine itself is simple enough," he says. "It's pretty straightforward, how it went together."
More than 100 years after it was manufactured, Steve's Rider-Ericsson "runs pretty well," he says.
"The biggest problem I have with it is that I get to talking to people at shows, and I let the fire go out," he says. "It's very temperature dependent: it's got to have a fire going under it."
Steve's is set up with a wood burner, although the original stove would burn wood or coal. To keep the engine running steadily, he needs to add a piece of wood - generally he uses oak - every 20 minutes.