The Dirty Swedish Mess Kit

hi guys dave here at humble tracker channel how you doing today this video is going to be a history and a user guide to the swedish personal mess kit now this may at first glance appear to be just a regular european style mid-century designed mess kit uh personal cooking equipment for out in the field but there's a couple of easter eggs in this that not everybody knows about and i'm going to show that now this particular model this is the m44 swedish mess kit uh introduced in 1944 and it's the aluminium variant the m44 means it's the aluminium variant introduced 1944. interestingly enough the actual history of this um type of mess kit goes all the way back to the late 19th century in the late 19th century around 1870 late 1870s early 1880s they introduced a version of this a variant of this which basically looked very much the same but was made out of copper and all around dimensions was slightly larger it was around 25 in all dimensions larger than this and it's incredible to think that really they had the idea for this nesting mess kit right back in the 19th century in 1895 the swedes they introduced basically the same design but in a an iron plate material because it was cheaper to manufacture that variant lasted all the way until 1940 and in 1940 they introduced the m40 which looks on the surface exactly the same as the m44 but it's made out of stainless steel and that was again replaced in 1944 with the aluminium variant because aluminium was cheaper and to a certain extent lighter so they went from copper to iron to steel to this version the m44 aluminium mainly for economic reasons they kept changing the material but also it was said that the iron version the one that was introduced 1895 left a nasty metallic taste on the food that you had in your cooking pot the hook here that you have when you're putting away for transportation you ram the hook push the hook into this loop here and that'll keep everything uh from rattling around exactly where you'll push it depends on your own personal version because over time these hooks they always develop their own shape from being bent this is sometimes known as a swedish army transier but in actual fact only one component of it is made by transient the beauty of it one of the reasons it's popular is because it's completely self-contained with everything you need for field kitchen let me put this to one side this part is known as the wind shield in usage the windshield is orientated so it's got two metal folding legs sort of thing inside of it when it's packed down you push them down into the bottom and then when you want to use it you pull them up like this so that it creates a platform for your pot we'll get into more of that later the windshield let's put that to one side and actually when i hit this i think this actually might part might be made out of steel and not aluminium but don't hold me to that that's not so important what's made out then you get to the rest of the contraption it's got a bail or carrying arm here and a hook and it's got a funny little notch here on the bail arm and i'm going to get to all that's for later that's one of the worst of us so we open it up here with this handle arm you take this part off and this part is what is generally known as the the frying pan it's a bit of a glorious name for what it actually is and inside it's got a military mark three crowns for sweden and it's got a number there which is the number is three two zero zero i don't know what the significance of that is but this is definitely aluminium and here you've got two little loops again this is another innovative design feature which we'll get onto later but let me show you why one of the reasons this is a smart deal because you can get anything nearly everything you need for your cooking set inside it and what you get in it what you can fit in it is a swedish army what this is known as swedish is a corsa which is basically a plastic mug and you see it's got like an egg shaped form and when i first came across these cups and i was giving something to drink out of it i hated them absolutely hate them i still don't like them to this day because i don't like drinking out of them it's just a funny shape you spill your coffee or spill your juice or whatever it is you've got coming out of it because the way you put it on your lips and i've never really i could never understand why these plastic mugs were built in this in this shape until i learned more about this kit and i learned that it's because it fits inside it like this so the plastic swedish army corsa is a an extra that fits inside you also fit inside the fuel bottle and inside a plastic bag to stop it leaking the brass transier alcohol stove and this is the only part of the stove which is made by trangia or designed by transient it's not necessarily made by tranjia because it's outsourced to other other factories so to speak so and then you've got your final your your saucepan your large cooking vessel so inside it you get your alcohol stove your plastic corsa or plastic cup the spirits bottle so you've got everything you need apart from maybe a fire sauce and a spoon for your camp kitchen this cook set is designed to either be used over an open fire or using the spirit stove so with a spirit stove you'd open up you pour in your alcohol for you and then you put over the windshield like this you see this is not a symmetrical windshield there's a slot there and you would put in for example your saucepan and cook oh but now we've got a problem this is going to get hot this is going to get hot aluminium really conducts heat very very uh well so this handle is going to get hot so they thought about that those smart swedes and they put two holes in it like this so let's just move this out of the way all you need to do is pick up a twig or small stick from the floor of the forest and voila you have a non-conducting handle perfectly crafted for cooking with which you can either use on your stove like that or you could you know hold that over an open fire fantastic right so that's what those two hoops are useful there let's put this back let's imagine we're cooking up again we're not going to use the frying pan we're going to use the uh the large vessel we put the large vessel on it like this and this is fine right we're cooking up we're cooking our water but the handle falls down we turn around we have a oh no what's happened all of a sudden all the flames are going up around the side this is getting really really hot and you've got to try and somehow grab this pot and pull it off and you're going to burn your fingers or you have to get your gloves out or something like that really really annoying but no there's clever swedes they've afforded that they've actually created a free point handle system and that's where the second notch comes in so let's get this out of the way give some space you put the the loop there the hat of the hanging hook there and you fold the hook like that i'll give you a close-up how i do it and then you've got a firm handle for your cooking pot so you can use that on your stove like that and also of course it's useful but one of the problems with this is that if you've got the the bowel over the top like this when you come to eat out of it you're holding it like this and your hands going to be in the way but now when you eat with it like this you can hold it in your left hand like this quite comfortably and you can access it with your spoon or your fork get your soup out there get your stew out there get whatever is out there without having your your holding hand over the top of it so it's useful keep your hand away from the heat and also makes it a handier carrying handle when you actually want to eat from it so that's how you set it up use that third notch wedge the hook under the that loop there and you've got a firm free carrying handle anytime you've got the option you can cook over an open fire like this hang it off of a tripod and if you need to or you want to you can decrease the boiling time by using the frying pan as a lid this is known in sweden as the snusk burken which translated in english kind of means the the dirty box and the reason it's no given that name is because due to the the shape of it when you eat from it especially if you're in a rush if you can imagine if you're in the military and you've got to quickly eat and then move to the next base or camp or whatever the hell you're doing you don't spend a lot of time cleaning it and also if you don't have you know the right type of brushes good brushes and good detergent it's actually very difficult to get right down into the corners there so invariably what would happen if you went on out on a training session you come back after five days with basically five days residue of food in the bottom of it and that's kind of like one of the reasons i personally don't use it i have used it to test it i prefer the modern uh a more modern type of mess kit for my own usage just because it's it's a little bit difficult to to clean it out basically that's the one negative i have with it until next time take it easy have a great one you

Channel: Very Survival

Views: 15,620

Rating: 4.8545456 out of 5

Keywords: humble trekker channel, bushcraft video, gear review, snuskburken, m40 snuskkburjken, snuskburk, snuskburken m40, swedish army mess kit, swedish army trangia mess kit, swedish army messkit cooking, swedish army mess kit video, army mess kit collection, mess kit history

Id: uZs56l4CEQg

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2020