Paladin's Random Crap - Part 3

The summer heat continues and my list of workshop projects on hold grows. Relief isn't too far away, though (I hope). Soon I'll be back out in my workshop happily toiling away until it gets too cold this winter.

For now, though, here's another glimpse of the weird stuff I have laying about the Paladin household. This week: Antique Kitchen Appliances.

At one time I had a sickness. Friends, I fell into the clutches of a compulsion that most folks have never heard of.

I collected and restored antique kitchen mixers. There's even a collector's group known as WACEM (We Actually Collect Electric Mixers). It can be an interesting hobby, and a lot of people take it VERY SERIOUSLY. Back several years ago, when I was at the height of my tinkering with the stuff, I stumbled upon a rare old mixer in the dusty corner of an antique store. I cleaned it up and listed it for sale via ebay. My $50 rusty junker turned into an $800 sale.

I crap you negative.

Thankfully, I've since kicked the habit and sold or otherwise gotten rid of most of my collection. These things can be cool .... but Man they take up a lot of room once you get more than a couple of them. All the stuff I've had was very beat up and trashed out when I got it. Most of it would have ended up in the landfill if I hadn't taken it in.

Here's some shots of the handful of pieces that I restored and still have around the house. All these are from the 1930's, and everything works as it should:

Hamilton Beach model B mixer with Juicer attachment:

Hamiton Beach Model C mixer, attached to a power transfer unit and shredder attachment:

Waring "Rocketship" Blendor, with promotional lid advertising Ron Rico Rum:

Kitchenaid A-9 Coffee Grinder. They make reproductions of this now, but mines the real thing:

I also have a couple of milkshake mixers but I don't include them here cuz they're more "soda fountain" than "kitchen"... I'll have a whole seperate post on soda fountain stuff :)

While we're on the topic of antique kitchen stuff... here's a short video of one wall in my kitchen. I shot this a while back while testing a new camera.



In the vid you see and hear a Truetone tube radio, tuned tuned to an oldies station here in Dallas. This is one of several old tube radios that I have (another post?). I don't do restoration on the "guts", or chasis, of the radios at this point. I try to find old radios that still work, but have beat up, or broken, cases to restore. I listen to this radio every morning while I drink my coffee and become a human once again.

You also see some hand crank kitchen shredders, an old apple peeler, and an Arcade crank coffee grinder. The telephone is an Automatic Electric Monophone "Jukebox" wall phone. She's hooked up to a phone line and still works, but we dropped our land line a couple of years ago. I miss hearing her ring - she rings loudly enough to hear outside the house - and I've actually considered getting a land line again just so I can use this old phone again :)