Winter in a SMALLER hobbit hole

As of October, I will officially be a Shipwright's Apprentice at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael's, MD. For all of you who thought i had officially gone to the dogs and decided to just quit working forever, fear not. Its a (nominally) paid position with responsibilities including, but not limited to: cleaning and painting bilges, walking Rosie the shop dog, maintaining and restoring the floating fleet of historical vessels large and small, as well as interacting with the public in an educational way. The boat shop is a working exhibit, so when a 10 year old kid asks "what's that funny looking chisel?" i tell him its a corking iron and that I'm using it to drive cotton into the seams of some beautiful, rotten, leaky old hulk that we're trying to keep off the bottom.

"Nominally paid" means i can either buy housing or food, but not both, so i have opted to stay on my 23' sailboat at anchor through a Baltimore winter. I'll be across the bay during the week and home on the weekends, so I'll at least be able to shower, warm up, and do some laundry. During the week, I'll be colder than shit. And this time, i won't be able to stand up straight unless i go outside.

That's why i contracted my brother at "K-novel Inc." to build me a bad ass wood stove out of $20 worth of scrap steel. Feast your eyes upon this beauty. Design inspiration by some old English dude with a fish boat on YouTube.

It mounts to the mast step on the inside, and the flue goes through the deck, as per usual in a marine stove application. Not particularly looking forward to cutting a 5" hole in the lid of my boat, but its gotta be done. My brother stayed awake at night ensuring that i would have a smoke free environment, and swore if this boat ever sank, somebody was diving after this thing. So far, the tally is about $20 for steel and $400 for beer.

I have been assured that one load of wood will burn for about 2 hours, and its so hot, I'll probably burst into flames (especially if i have been using Bondo in the shop). I nearly choked to death the other day trying to light a "proper" vintage marine stove on a friend's boat, so I'm pretty excited about the smokeless K-novel model. Check out the prices on the competitor's website:
http://www.marinestove.com/sardineinfo.htm
ONLY a thousand bucks. Hell, I'll take two.

Taking orders now. K-novel Marine has a blue light special on wood stoves...Aisle 4.