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Post by earlh on Sept 17, 2020 11:11:00 GMT -5
I had a gal on my route that i visit with once in awhile tell me that her mother had a Chambers stove that she wanted to get rid of and that it wasn't in very good shape. I had some time yesterday so I followed up on it and my nephew and I got it up out of the basement. She actually has two of them and said she would give me a call when she had the other one unearthed. Her husband picked them up at auctions 40 plus years ago and she never had any interest in them so she was glad to get it out of the house! The legs and some of the other stuff are gone. She said she knew this one had no legs on it when he brought it home because she remembered asking him where he thought he was going to get those bought? It's too bad about the legs as I like the earlier style better and after seeing this one up close and taking it apart, I'll have to see if someone has a set of the older legs I can buy and put on the Ivory one that I'm working on right now.
I could see the other one in back of a bunch of stuff in her basement (we all know collectors like this and usually have a habit of a little bit of this ourselves) and it seems he might have dragged the stuff home that didn't get a bid! So, she said she might get a path cleared this year or next spring and we could worry about that stove then. Now that someone is willing to pull the heavy thing out of there, she said she had a little incentive to dig it out! I could see enough of the other stove to know it's a little newer than this one is. One of the burners is missing on this one and the oven door frame seems to be spring as it won't close easily and seems to be striking the bottom before the top. It's also very rusty and when I took the two back screws out of the thermowell it fell to the bottom! The ID tag is gone and someone used some wire to try to hold the well in place. And the cast iron frame that holds the damper on the thermowell is broken.
I do like the smooth top a little better than the ribbed top, but it's not worth all the rigmarole it would take to change all that around. The earlier style legs would bolt right in. But I might see about putting one of the six light burners in that Ivory stove. I know you all like looking at pictures, so here a few are. Also, this one is set up for natural gas and that Ivory stove I have is for Propane. I wasn't sure about that until now. After seeing the orifices on this one Mach 12 is right and that is how the other stove is set up. So now that should be a relatively simple thing to change out. They are the adjustable type on this stove too. I wonder how they decided to put put these adjustable orifices on some and not others? Maybe it was a choice dealers could make depending on what has was usually available in the area the stoves were being sold in.
Also, if you want a picture of something specific so let me know and I'll see what I can do.
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Post by pooka on Sept 17, 2020 12:08:08 GMT -5
The word that comes to mind is it's a hoopty. That's usually pertains to a wreck of an old car. You can do anything to it. From scraping it to restore it, & anything in between. It could be for parts, or customize to your heart content.
I'll admit, the smooth top on these is appealing. It's more pleasing to the eye not having the ridges to break up the surface. The ribbing is intended to make it easier to slide heavy pots across the top, but if you do that a lot, it wears them down to bare metal over time. I prefer to pick my pans up to move them.
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Post by earlh on Sept 17, 2020 13:24:58 GMT -5
I'm with you on sliding things around on anything that really isn't meant to have stuff slid across it. Even though my pickup is kind of a piece of junk, I would never set stuff on the hood or top of it. I see people do that all the time and it's really hard on the paint.
I have this thing farther apart now, and if I was a welder, I could see where the parts around the base that are rusted out it could be repaired. But it would really need to be the only thing someone had on their plate. Or it held some special sentimental reason to be restored. The whole front of the Thermowell is either rusted through, or nearly that way. If the legs had stayed on it, I have a feeling it would have fared much better. It would have at least been up off the floor of the basement. And it's hard to tell where it was before that. She said the legs were already gone, and it had a bunch of straw and junk down in it that kind of lead me to think it ended up in a shed or chicken house. Oh well, There will be parts left over that I don't need and I'll get rid of when I'm done with the one I'm putting together for myself.
I do like the 6 light burners very much. The later one's were probably a little less expensive and maybe it turned out the average user didn't need quite that much heat under a pan! Probably was warping the bottoms of those expensive club aluminum or wear-ever pans....
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Post by earlh on Sept 18, 2020 16:53:50 GMT -5
I thought I'd pull the oven out of that thing today and see if anybody could use it, but it's all rusting out, or rusted out around the seams. The bottom is really rusty as well, so that's not going to be any good for someone. It's too bad as it really doesn't look all that bad until you see all the daylight through the seams. The cast iron frame for the oven door is broken and sprung as well. I couldn't figure out why the door wouldn't close until I got after it with the grinder with a wire wheel on it and then it's pretty obvious. Someone must have stood on the oven door or piled something really heavy on it. An old antique dealer that my Dad was good friends with used to get cook stoves in his shop once in awhile. If they were all rusted out, but still looked good he would say "That's a looker, and NOT a cooker!" Ozzie was pretty funny and was a extremely good piano player. It's too bad that this thing was mishandled the way it was, but it sure makes me a lot happier about the one I am going through.
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Post by mach12 on Sept 18, 2020 17:29:14 GMT -5
I thought I'd pull the oven out of that thing today and see if anybody could use it, but it's all rusting out, or rusted out around the seams. The bottom is really rusty as well, so that's not going to be any good for someone. It's too bad as it really doesn't look all that bad until you see all the daylight through the seams. The cast iron frame for the oven door is broken and sprung as well. I couldn't figure out why the door wouldn't close until I got after it with the grinder with a wire wheel on it and then it's pretty obvious. Someone must have stood on the oven door or piled something really heavy on it. An old antique dealer that my Dad was good friends with used to get cook stoves in his shop once in awhile. If they were all rusted out, but still looked good he would say "That's a looker, and NOT a cooker!" Ozzie was pretty funny and was a extremely good piano player. It's too bad that this thing was mishandled the way it was, but it sure makes me a lot happier about the one I am going through. Sad that it has been let go like that but I'm really glad that it found its way to someone who will salvage the good parts. A lot of stoves with a lot of good parts have gone to the scrap dealers when those parts could have kept a bunch of other stoves in kitchens. I got a B similar to that a couple of years ago. I was free, so I didn't look a gift horse in the mouth and loaded it up and headed home. When we got it home ("we" being me and Dwayner) it was quickly apparent that this was one that was going to give life to some others. The thing that I hadn't paid any attention to when we picked it up was that it was a B that was set up from the factory for propane. The burners didn't have the chimney extensions and the drip pans were the shallow ones. The mixers were in the upper bracket holes and they had the long orifice caps. That, to me, was worth the trip in itself. So glad she didn't just call a scrap dealer!
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Post by dwayner2 on Sept 19, 2020 2:25:01 GMT -5
I’ll admit I haven’t read all the posts on this thread so I’ll just ask and maybe look silly. Are you parting it out for parts to sell? I know someone who might want A parts for their Imperial stove (nice thumbtabs, valve control assembly, etc) and someone here or another site was wanting a 6-daisy burner. Unless the inner porcelain pieces are badly rusted thru I’d say save those for sure. They can always get new porcelain and the A stoves are getting harder to find so....
I just looked at your pictures and noticed the pilot assembly for the top burners is something different than I’ve seen on an A stove...cool.
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Post by earlh on Sept 19, 2020 20:06:37 GMT -5
The gal has one other stove in her basement and after she gets that dug out and I see what's going on there, and when I get that Ivory stove I'm working on done, then I'll know what I can part company with. I am NOT going into the stove restoration business. I just don't have that much ambition, and I mostly just wanted one for myself. I have a feeling I can get my Mom interested in one, and if that third one is restorable I'll sell it after I go through it. I can see why all of you folks really like these things as they are nice. If I had a huge kitchen I could see having two of them for the heck of it. But that's hardly the case.
I'm going to decide about which top I'll put on that Ivory stove. I do like the smooth top better and the 6 light burners are interesting as well. But who knows how much aggravation I want to put myself though. It does look like that top will bolt right on to the stove that I'm in the middle of. I will give Chambers credit for sticking with a design once they got it figured out. That model B that's 10-12 years newer sure has a great deal in common with these stoves from the mid 30's. I have always admired companies that found a good design and stopped messing with it. I've collected phonographs since I was a kid and HOLY COW did the Victor Talking Machine company create a mess for themselves. Dozens of motor types, all kinds of hardware changes and some cabinets had motors specific to that cabinet only. It must have been a great deal of trouble keeping all of that straight at the factory with parts and setting up machines to make the products, and so forth. And the guy that founded the company was a machinist! And they must have made cranks in 1/8" increments to add no end of confusion there as well. Not to mention male ends, female ends and even slotted ends. Around 1918 they standardized much of that stuff, but it took them nearly 20 years.
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