[Danial Beard]

We hit one of those relatively welcome milestones a weeks days ago. The War Department officially got old. I can’t get too uppity about it though, because I added another notch in the cake about a half a year back, and my notch count is higher than hers. But birthdays are special, and part of that whole birthday shenanigan is the classic celebratory birthday cake. I happily made one for her. It was nice enough, but there’s no way on God’s green earth I was ever gonna put that many candles on it, though. That would be patently unwise, and the Fire Marshal would have gone green in the gills, muttering something about, “excessive fuel loading.”

Mine hit that point a while back.

When I got the ingredients out on the counter, and reached for the hand mixer (a Sunbeam MixMaster which was a wedding gift from her aunt Jo multiple decades ago), she piped up from the craft/sewing room and said, “you might want to check the mixer, it kinda smelled funny and bogged a little the last few times I used it.”

Uh, oh! She has always had a gift for understatement. I didn’t even plug it in. I immediately took the mixer back and put it on the teardown table. Cake first, then time to pull it apart and look for slag and burned bodies. Back to the kitchen I went, and pulled out the one I inherited from my mother. It whirred up just like it should, smelling slightly of old appliance grease and ozone, and soon the cake went into the oven on schedule. After I cleaned the bowl and beaters, I took that mixer back to the service area, too. While I was working on stuff, I figure to internally clean and re-grease than one, as well.

The contrast between the two was startling.

The Sunbeam is mostly plastic. ( https://www.ebay.com/itm/386231491201 ) The bottom half is essentially a boat hull including assorted support struts and mounts for the field windings and bearing mounts for the armature. The beater transmission is also molded plastic framework. Sketchy as the devil, but it’s been working for decades, so I won’t go off on that too hard. The wiring, however, is a road apple from a different bowl of batter. Sketchy doesn’t begin to cover it. And that’s where the problem was. There were no dedicated wiring channels, so as the wires from the motor to the switch aged, sagged and then stiffened, they inevitably came into contact with one of the gears of the transmission.

Gears have teeth. That didn’t end well. I can say it’s a bloody good thing those gears are plastic. Otherwise it could have been a lot uglier. Bottom line, I ended up rewiring it, lubricating the bearings, re-assembling it, and putting it on display as a knick-knack. It’s got some sentimental value, and will do in a pinch, but it’s basically been retired in favor of the other one.

The second mixer, is a Dormey Model 7500. ( https://thisamericanhouse.com/secondhand-stories-dormey…/ ) It was made by the Dormeyer Company back around 1950, maybe a little earlier. I think mom got it new in her early twenties. It’s built like a tank. It’s heavy, solid, compact and powerful. The motor housing is metal and so are the transmission housing and internal gears and components. Internally, it’s very well designed both for assembly and longevity. There are no wires hanging or routed anywhere near moving parts. The unit separates into two sections, one the dedicated motor housing, the other the transmission. Ergo, servicing it was a breeze. The same for re-assembly. It’s now — once again — the go-to tool for household mixing chores. I did, however, replace the power cord. The 75 year old insulation was getting a little stiff and crumbly.

So, I guess the bottom line and the take-away is simply this. Just because it’s old, doesn’t automatically mean it’s broken or valueless, and quality absolutely counts. And in a lot of ways, I suspect that applies to people as well as appliances.

From the service bench here at The Paper Radio, may your birthday cakes become fire hazards, and your inherited appliances easily outlive the next generation.

-30-

• This topic was modified 3 months, 2 weeks ago by Danial Beard.

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