The best parties always take place in the kitchen.
First of all, of course, we need the kitchen worktop. Coincidentally, one of the prints I had made for the Revell Constitition fits like a glove, no wonder, almost the same scale and the design was based anyway on the design of the British
Anyway, the kitchen and hearth are only worth as much as the life that takes place there.
The first three men assigned to kitchen duty were quickly pressed. Frederick Bush, the 24-year-old, hunky German is fetching firewood, Irishman Thomas Foley, at 47 one of the oldest crew members on board, will be working on a meat-like structure and Hans Yaul from Switzerland will be chasing the protein-rich maggots out of the cheese with his big knife.
Number 4 was more of a challenge. It's always nice when the kits come with little men, but they're usually not the right kind of hands-on character. Here on the right is a sailor from the Constitution kit.
Any sailor would immediately fall over on land with his legs in a row like this, so I first changed the leg position to a stable three-point position and also tilted the head slightly for the dynamics. After all, he should be fuelling the stove. However, the test position then showed a completely incorrect and far too static posture for this.
So he bent his back and brought his second arm into a working position. Now he finally looks like somebody doing a job.
Number 4 is alive
I then used one of my misprints to prepare the wood filling. The grill at the front of the Brodie Stove has 3 sections, so apparently you can fire it in 3 sections depending on what capacity you need. This is also the log length that dear Frederick has in his arms at the moment.
Afterwards, the lower decks are secured against falling objects with cotton wool pads ...
... and the grill is carfully loaded with firewood. We now know that our dear Lord of the Fire is 28-year-old James Caton from Brazil, with the logs that Frederik has placed in front of him and two bags of coals next to him for a nice, even heat.
And here you can already see why I had to shorten the height of the Brodie Stove compared to the original drawings: of course it has to pass under the deck beam and the two lids at the top should still be accessible. That's why there is a gap of exactly one deck beam width between the chimney and the lids at the top. How these two boilers could be effectively operated and cleaned with this limited access is still beyond my understanding.
Just like the automatic turning mechanism of the grill spit at the front. I know of English country houses that have a similar system, but there are usually much larger fires at work. The mechanics of the drive chain and the corresponding bearing of the spit are not yet technically comprehensible to me in detail, even if they are based on identical plans in the NMM.
Furthermore, you have to bear in mind that the whole stove is only a replica based on the plan just mentioned. I think back then, the stove size and installation situation were customised for each ship. Whether this is all correct in the replica is therefore not known. And fortunately, the difference in height is no longer noticeable once installed in the model.
And while we're on the subject of size and deck height, Frederick, with his height of 1.9 metres, which was unusual for the time but not uncommon, also has a problem here ...
... that standing is just about possible, but the next deck beam is already lurking for his head.
So he was also clever enough to adopt a slightly more stooped posture to wriggle past the firewood, the coal bags and the water barrels.
In the small cooking chamber you can already see that with two people it's going to be a tight squeeze, especially if there's someone else working on the cooker. I have deliberately avoided decorating the worktop like the breakfast buffet in Portsmouth, as everyone brings what they need for cooking from their mess and has to leave a clean worktop afterwards. After all, this is the only cooking area for 800+ crew members.
And that's the end of the small picture in the picture, just a few more impressions
Prost Mahlzeit,
XXXDAn
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