And this one is salvaged Bamix #5. The older model (Bamix #4) in the box was just found 3 days ago at the same thrift store. Wondering if the same person donated both.
My theory is that people are inheriting these from their parents without knowing the original purchase price and subsequently junking them perhaps from lack of use or in favor of newer shinier stainless steel clad models.
But if this was true there shouldn’t be a regional effect, unless many more of these were originally purchased in Northern California than in other localities.
Ha!
You’ve described my philosophy as a veteran picker/junk dealer.
If there’s one valuable cool item, there’s probably more.
On the other hand, if you see a Lawrence Welk album, just move on.
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
263
What is this, something like 5 or 6 now? You’re the Bamix Wizard. I still have never seen one.
Cool to see the box. One of mine, inherited, has brown plastic for the mill housing, stand and trim. Yours looks newer. Did it come with a thick glass beaker?
Tomorrow I pick up a new hard drive, onto which all the data was recovered from one that suddenly died. 1200 LPs that I haven’t been able to listen to for over 10 years! I’d painstakenly removed every pop, rumble and hiss.
It turn out #5 doesn’t spin right either. I opened it up and did a deep clean and lube, put it all back together after 2 hours of fiddling, tested it and…. Smoke everywhere!
I opened it up again and the motor was nuclear hot and has plastic melted all over it. I can’t even tell where the plastic came from. It took a long time to cool. I think the motor is toast and this is probably why it was donated to begin with. Now I’m considering returning it for the $7.50 I paid vs keeping it for parts.
And I’m reluctant to work on the older #4 in the box which also doesn’t spin.
The one in the box doesn’t have the beaker. But it did have 3 blades and the chopper housing.
Now I keep my eyes open for them each time I enter the store. There were three last summer, then nothing until two in April of this year. And these last two are duds with motor failure, but probably worth the price paid just for the blades.
There’s a tiny shop in town that I’ve seen that says “I fix things.” I’m considering taking the burned motor to see if they can fix such a thing or not.
I opened this one up and overhauled the internals. The biggest thing was the shaft was gummed up, which cleaned up nice with some wd40.
The motor was pretty clean. There was some carbon on the internal copper ring that touches the brushes (I could be using the totally wrong terminology here), but it didn’t need sanding.
Seems to be working great now.
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
271
I got this Legnoart ~ 20x20x1.5" board from the Humane Society thrift (stock photo). It’s in great shape, obviously well used but nothing other than some surface cuts none deeper than about 200 microns. Cost was $8 and the Amazon listing I stole the photo from is at $150 (LegnoartUSA website has same price).
I’ll sand it a bit, take off the feet (I only use the channeled side of a board when expecting a lot of juice, otherwise the channel is bug-not-feature), stain it with some chicory espresso concentrate, then oil it up good as new.
Staining wood with coffee + chicory! Thanks for mentioning this.
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
273
Welcome. I suppose there are food grade stains available but I’m too lazy to look. I do 5-6 coats of concentrated coffee, letting them dry between. Then a day or so after the last coffee coat, start the mineral oil, letting something like 8 coats sink in. The mineral oil only partially seals it, so some of the coffee will still bleed off in the first couple of washings. But a considerable amount of color remains. Note if the previous owner kept the board well oiled (like according to the mantra, “once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year, then yearly thereafter”) then the coffee will just bead up and not stain it.
Here’s an example of one I did for a daughter (posted upthread, and yes, it’s in the shape of a toilet tank lid and these pics are of the bottom surface). Some of the color change is just a time-of-day effect, though. I think one photo was taken during the day with a fair bit of natural light and the other at night under all artificial.
Have you ever tried bleaching wood before staining and sealing? Someone recommended this technique to me to both bring out figure in woods and as a check against the wood overdarkening in use. It seems to work well for knife scales.
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
275
That hadn’t occurred to me; thanks, I’m always in favor of accentuating grain patterns. I’ll read on it a bit and might try it with the Legnoart board I just got. My only concern would be whether and to what extent/how long there might be retained bleach odor despite lots of rinsing (the chicory scent from staining hangs around for weeks of use, but bleach might not). Or I could use an industrial grade peroxide instead.
YW. My concern was mostly how long to bleach–the wood can get quite light-colored, and initially looks ruined. But IME the color and figure come back with the stain and sealant. And it does seem to work in delaying the wood going dark and losing figure. You have to experiment on scrap to dial it in.
Best areas for estate sales are towns with at least one generation of housing. Newly developed neighborhoods have housing with less accumulation over years.
Not exactly cookware, but today I found and bought a minty-fresh Kirby G5B vacuum for $39.95 at Goodwill.
If you look up the word ‘ugly’ in any dictionary, there’s an illustration of a Kirby. But this thing’s incredible. I had no idea there were so many attachments. This crazy machine has a transmission!
I grew up with Kirby’s. My father had a childhood friend who sold them. My 91-year-old mother still has a Kirby upright but the thing is so heavy she doesn’t use it anymore. I used to drive her downtown to take that beast for service sometimes when I went home to visit her. What kind of machine is the G5B?
