Scow project update, June 12, 2010: testing the stove!

I bought this stove about 7 years ago for the scow reenactment but had never tried it out. We did so tonight. The whole stove weighs 200 pounds (about 90.7 kg). There is a metal upright backing and shelf which will be used on the trip but is not shown here. We are not sure of the vintage of this stove, but it seems to be about 1920-1925. Some of the stoves parts bear part numbers and the first two numbers are "25" so this may be the year of manufacture. It is a McClary "Triumph". Patty gave it a good cleaning, removing dried on food splatter from inside the oven from who knows when. Loaded it with wood and fired it up and it was smoking fairly good from places we did not want it it to but once we figured out how to operate the dampers and added some lengths of stovepipe it worked fine with all smoke going up the chimney as it should. Surprisingly the seemingly broken thermometer on the door worked, but reads 60F higher than reality. We tried some basic things such as boiling a kettle of water, frying up some bacon, making a piece of bannock bread, and heating up some ham steaks. All were accomplished without issues. I was surprised how little wood it used to get the job done. As a Canadian who has camped a lot, I am used to big roaring campfires but that was not needed in this case. So we will not need the armloads of wood daily that I thought we would be collecting and cutting up. After the stove cooled down I got out a wire brush and did more cleaning and one minor repair. We will try baking some dinner rolls in the oven tomorrow and perhaps some other baking items.