Check out my trashcan find!

[westytoploader]

Here's an early Sharp I saw at an estate sale last December. Anyone know when this was made? Looks at least 20 years old...

--Austin

 

[kenmore1978]

Dating Sharp MW

Since it has the carousel, I suspect early 80's

 

[lavamat_jon]

Carousel

I didn't know the Sharp Carousel was that old! That range was still going strong until a couple of years ago here, when they were just rebranded "Sharp".

I can't believe how big microwaves used to be. We replaced a Sona (I'm not sure if you got them in the US) from the 1980s, which was a huge monstrasity a couple years ago with a new microwave (only a horrible cheap timer one - doesn't even do seconds!), but I'm surprised at how compact they have become. That said, the interior was quite a bit smaller than the old one, I guess it's because the one we have now is microwave only whereas our old one was a microwave/grill.

Jon

 

[kenmore1978]

Microwave sizes

Microwaves haven't really become smaller, they just started offering smaller sizes. You can still buy a huge monster microwave if you want one. They seem to come in 4 sizes now, full size, medium, compact, & itsy-bitsy, about the size of a toaster oven.

I hate the current cheapie microwaves that have manual timers. The original manual timers had the dial spread from 0 to 1 minute in such a way that one could set time les than a minute fairly accurately. The new ones crowd the dial so it's virtually impossible to set time for less than a minute, and setting is more critical now than then because microwaves are more powerful now and a few seconds can make quite a difference.