The waffle maker from hell

Friends of ours are updating their now full-time home, which began as a summer lake cottage in the.. 1950s?

About six weeks ago, they were over for dinner and brought this waffle maker they’d found in the back of a closet, enshrouded in a 30 gallon trash bag (and for good reason).

Challenge accepted! BTW, that power cord isn’t black.

This had been up in that closet since at least the 1990s. They were going to throw it away, but they thought maybe I’d want to take it on as a project. We didn’t really need a waffle maker, let alone one that’s probably pushing seventy five years old and in dire need of attention. So what did I do?

I immediately said “Hell yes, I’ll take it!” Why not? It was free. More on that free part later.

This is a Sears Kenmore waffle maker/griddle, model number 344-6613. I figure it’s most likely from the early to mid-1950s. There’s an art deco vibe to it, which is kind of cool. I saw potential.

Now committed, first thing to do is start taking it apart so I can clean it. In the end, some 95% of this project involved figuring out ways to take apart and clean shit without destroying it.

Griddle surfaces don’t look too bad from here. That’s deceptive.

The black crusty stuff coating the hinge mechanism in the image below is rock-hard. Should be fun times getting that off..

For starters, I went medieval on the griddles. First, a scrub with a wire brush and soapy water, then carpet-bombing them with oven cleaner. I would have further disassembled them before doing this, but there was too much crud on everything to even get purchase on the fasteners with a screwdriver, socket, or wrench. That shit needed serious softening up before it could be dug out.

I think I’ll step outside and breathe for a few moments so I don’t die.

Here it is, mostly taken apart. I’m beginning to question certain recent life choices.

Wires look OK, connecting hardware looks iffy.

More disassembly. That tray at top mid-right below is full of nuts, screws, washers, and other small bits stewing in a unique (and very effective) combination of oven cleaner, Simple Green, Windex, brake cleaner, freon, carburetor cleaner, leaded gasoline, uranium hexafluoride, mineral spirits, starting fluid, Dawn dish soap (It has to be be Dawn or it won’t work), acetone, pure gum turpentine, and WD-40. A patent is pending.

Getting there, time for a beer break to think my next steps over.

Behold the meticulous organization of the tools and workpieces in the image below. Everything in its place in my shop, that’s my motto.

This is fine. It’s all going according to plan.

I won’t show more disassembly, but it’s now finally broken down into relatively clean, manageable components. I did shear a few too-rusted fasteners and had to fix/replace those — The usual thing with deals like this.

I started cleaning in earnest with the upper and lower aluminum griddles, taking sandpaper grits up from 80 to 3000, along with wire brushes and all sorts of Dremel tool attachments for the corners. Finally, hitting them with rubbing compound. Several eternities later I had two like this:

I’d eat bacon cooked on that. I WILL eat bacon cooked on that.

For the base, lid, and waffle irons, I stuffed them into a plastic trash bag and hosed them down with oven cleaner. It’s been hot lately so I left the bag out in the sun for a few days, re-dousing it every so often. Better living through chemistry. It took two and a half cans of EZ-Off, and the parts still needed more attention afterward. The base came out great and the lid came out so-so but it should buff right out. The aluminum waffle irons on the other hand..

Now the part I’d been dreading: Those waffle irons. Oven cleaner and steel wool only goes so far. The rest was oxidation and residual carbon, and that crap could be used to line a fusion reactor. Huh, another patent opportunity.. Anyway, aggressive measures were called for. My trusty Dremel tool with various-shaped wire brush attachments did the job. My math comes up with 1,960 individual surfaces to clean, not to mention the edges, dimples, and channels. This took forever.

The Dremel’s motor would get so hot I’d have to hang it in front of a box fan to cool it off every 20 minutes or so.

But hey, I’ve got most of the hardware and small pieces all cleaned up, sitting in that magnetic tray at top left below.

Only seven more sections to go. Almost there..

Several eternities later we have the image below. Mass quantities of weed, beer, and music went into this. I’m pretty certain I have carpal tunnel. I’m also pretty sure I don’t want to see a waffle any time real soon.

I’ll show no more because I’m re-living the trauma just talking about it..

Onward to something new. Here is one of the Bakelite handles, all polished up. The rest got the same treatment. Bakelite is an early form of plastic, developed in the 1910s. It’s a good insulating material, but can be brittle. More on that later. It does clean up really nice with wet-sanding through the grits and hitting it with some polishing compound. One of the few easy things about this project.

It’s almost ready for re-assembly, but I wanted to save the power cord. I soaked it in soapy water and oven cleaner, scrubbing it with a toothbrush now and then and adding more soap and EZ-Off as I felt needed. This proceeded over several days. When I had it as clean as it I was going to get it, I hung it up and let it dry out for a week.

The cloth insulation at the plug end was good, but I ended up cutting about a foot off the other end because it was still too impregnated with grease to save. But there’s still five feet of nice cord left; should be enough. I used a zip tie behind that metal plate in the image below to keep the cord from tugging on the terminal attachments. And the cord’s cloth sheathing isn’t black. It’s green and gold! Who knew?

The cord cleaned up nice. Tested and no shorts. So far so good.

The lid’s not looking bad. Still needs more work, though.

Gulag-level hard labor here, but with beer.

All right. Everything is ready at last, and I put it all back together, a delightful process I’ll talk about a bit more later.

OK, Everything should work.

I plugged it in and popped a circuit breaker. Shit. I reset the breaker, plugged it again and the same thing happened. Duh.

I went back through the wiring, but this is about as simple a circuit as you can get. Just picture the wires as pipes and the electric current as water flowing through them, entering from one power cord terminal, traveling around the loop and exiting the other power cord terminal. It checked out fine; at least I didn’t mess that up..

So, the circuit’s not borked. What next? I suspected the temperature controller because it was the only thing left. My engineering education pays off again. The screws attaching the wires to it were stuck so bad that I may have gone just a little too barbaric on them. I must have cracked the mica insulators; that mica is damned fragile.

Sure enough, the temp controller tested bad. Double shit. Where the hell am I going to find one of these?

Here’s the temperature controller before I got those two screws at the right side out and destroyed it in the process.

The culprit. A shorted-out temperature controller.

Sigh. By now, I have too much human capital invested in resurrecting this thing. So I went to eBay and found a cooker that looked only maybe a year or so newer than mine. The base and handles were different, but the waffle irons and griddles were identical. The lid looked like the same as what I had, and it turned out to be so, but I was really after that temperature controller. I was betting $50 that they hadn’t changed it. Here’s what I got:

It was well-packaged, and this still happened. First World problems..

The Bakelite lid handle was damaged in shipping. The rest of it was fine. I contacted the seller and he’d insured the package and has submitted a claim to USPS. So I’ll get my fifty bucks back. Nice. I didn’t need that handle, anyway.

The temperature controller turned out to be identical to the bad one, so I was back in business. As a bonus, the stainless steel lid was indeed the same as mine. I had the original lid looking OK, but it still had issues and the donor unit’s lid was a lot nicer, so I used that instead. I have no shame.

The image below shows the internal wiring. There’s probably asbestos. I live dangerously.

Putting this back together again was a real juggling act. The upper and lower heating elements had to be securely electrically connected before I could attach the upper heating element to the upper griddle, then connect the whole lid to the hinge assembly. It would have been helpful to have a smart octopus as an assistant..

Getting here looks easy. It wasn’t. More beer is definitely called for.

The wires to the upper heating element are run through a coil spring to protect them from chafing, as shown below. The spring has little tangs at each end that lock into features on the base and lid so it doesn’t slip back and forth during opening and closing. They’re truly a royal pain to attach.

Oh, I haven’t mentioned that Kenmore used 11/32 inch nuts almost everywhere on this thing. 11/32 is a bastard size. I have plenty of tools, but I have no 11/32 inch wrenches or sockets. Putting this, along with the complicated lid hinge mechanism, back together basically sucked. Especially since I had to do it twice. The second time did go quicker, though. So there’s that. I’m becoming an expert.

The hinge and protective spring sleeve for the wires, viewed from below.

Here’s the bottom. There’s still some corrosion pitting but hey, it’s the bottom. The donor unit from eBay had a different design. Anyway, the bottom and base are still from the original.

Kenmore: a respected brand back then. They didn’t even have to mark it “Made in the USA”.

At last, here’s the finished, fully functioning result of some six weeks of hard labor, alongside of what I started with.

I’m pretty sure the cooking surfaces need to be seasoned before they’re used. I’ve never seasoned aluminum; I’ll have to look it up.

Every single piece of this cooker was made in the United States (or Canada). Seventy five years ago, we had the manufacturing infrastructure and supply chain in North America to make things like this right here at home. That’s all long-since departed to points south of the border and Asia. Sigh.

Rant over; here’s another look art this gloriously preserved piece of Americana.

I almost forgot! Putting back the white paint on the handle. It’ll need another coat.

The 1950s: When Sears made decent quality merchandise.

A couple shots of it down below in its natural environment — Our kitchen. BTW, that toaster is a 1930s-40s Sunbeam model T9, an iconic design. It’s rock solid reliable and we use it daily. Shit was mostly built to last back then, as long as you took care of it.

That’s all well and good, but do NOT touch any of the the stainless steel surfaces for a good fifteen or twenty minutes after using it. Like that toaster in the background, it gets real hot on the outside. Safety hadn’t been really been invented yet.. I can envision the owner’s manual if I’d been allowed to write it:

“You probably won’t be electrocuted by this appliance, but if you use it for a pillow right after making waffles, it’ll burn half of your face off.”

And it’s finished at last! I have not yet attempted to make waffles. It’s ultimate destiny? I don’t know. It looks cool on the counter but takes up a lot of space. We have a single-serving waffle maker tucked away in a cupboard that serves the two of us well. There’s room in the garage to store it. For now.

I love that hinge mechanism, but it’s a real bear to clean.

Speaking of the garage, the beer fridge out there has been having door sealing issues. The door couldn’t be adjusted enough to get it to line up parallel with the refrigerator’s body opening. I bought some peel-and-stick sealing gasket at the hardware store several years ago, and it worked for awhile but it wasn’t a permanent solution — It’s compressed over time and lost its seal.

That let condensation form on the door’s inner panel and, um, trickle down, pooling and dripping off the bottom edge of the door. Shit started rusting. Not good.

The only way to fix this was to take the door off and waller out the hinges so I could get more adjustment. My poor Dremel took another beating. I bought some vintage-style sealing gasket specifically made for refrigerators like this and put it back together. So far, so good. I’ll know for sure if it works in about a week.