1967 Custom Imperial Flair

[panthera]

Drove a few hundred miles yesterday, picked this up - she works.

OK, we need a new heat regulator for the temp controlled burner, but that's all that's not working. Even the meat thermometer system is running!!!!!!!!

Oh, and the 110V burner got replaced with 220V at some time, nothing new there - they all failed about the second time people tried them (first time was in the factory for quality control).

Wow.

Given the hundreds of hours cleaning and repair my better half has put into the '60-61 Custom Imperial Flair, this is but a pleasant Sunday morning of easy work.

 

Guess this is a good time to mention we bought it for $100.00, the seller loved it but his wife wanted gas so when they finally got city gas, this beautiful lady went out the door for a commercial Wolff.....

 

 

 

[funktionalart]

Excellent deal--and so worth the drive to get it, I'd say. Thanks for saving it!! BTW, what is the story behind the refrigerator at the far left of the shot?

 

[vintage1963]

That International Harvester refrigerator is the same one my grandparents had for many, many years. It never stopped working. It kept everything cold as it was meant to.

 

[panthera]

Allen,

Except fora few power failures and one move to our patio, that refer has been in constant use for 61 years. Weighs a ton, seriously overdimensioned cooling system, been on our list to do cosmetic work for years.we keep dairy in it, it works so well.

 

[polkanut]

Ted & Viola, late friends of my parents, had the same model IH fridge in their kitchen from the day it and their house were brand new.  It was the only one they ever had.  The only repairs it ever needed were a couple of new door gaskets over the years.

 

[panthera]

Yeah,

A door gasket is needed - this one has the original or so old it might as well be. There's some bad cracks in the interior trim plastic and the outside needs a good sanding and refinishing but, otherwise - just fine.
IH really built great quality refrigeration. Pity they dropped it.

 

[combo52]

Nice 40" Flair

While the Speed Heat burners were more troublesome many lasted for decades, many of the 60s FD ranges I have the SH still works fine.

 

The benefit of the SH burner was not that great overall as it only cut about a minute or two off cooking operations, it was good if you were really in a hurry and only warming or cooking a small quantity of food.

 

Frigidaire often advertised this feature with a crying baby warming up a bottle of milk in the middle of the night.

 

[panthera]

John,

It is a good way to overcome thermal inertia, no question about it - I had a Gaggenau Kochtop in the late 1980s back home which used a similar trick to get past the horrid flat iron plate hobs - of course, that was a 3φ, so it wouldn't have been quite the same, but it did work.

And, it did blow out frequently.

 

I imagine one would have to use a slightly more tolerant heating system and not a standard one for these to actually hold up over the long-haul. Those which have (and I had one in mine which never failed) were probably at the upper limit of some factory tolerance on this or that expansion or thinness or something which let them cope with the thermal shock better.

 

Anyway, it is so cool to see these Flairs beginning to come out of the closet. We went nine years looking without finding anything but greasy old pieces of trash priced at several thousand dollars,<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> one OK Flair</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> needing serious work and now two Custom Imperials in only two years have walked into our yard for basically nothing.</span>

 

After a cursory look over (I won't plug anything in, ever, unless I've at least scanned for bumblebombs, selenium rectifiers, idiot in-duh-vi-dual's 'workarounds' involving 240V 50 circuits and band-aids...) it seems like Frigidaire by '67 had simplified a lot of things which in the first units looked more like a junior-high science project. Looking forward to getting everything sorted and having her up on her feet.

 

[panthera]

Correction,

Either late '63 or '64. Glass decoration still circular.