Rhode Island Rescue part 2 - The Frigidaire RCIE39K range

[turquoisedude]

This is the range was offered up by another member in the Shopper's Square forum.  I'll admit my first thought about it was "I had better not".  Then I ran the model number and my thought became "You _must_ save this!"  So I did....

The appliance is in absolutely amazing condition.  Chrome is shiny and bright, even the oven racks (no picture shown) are perfect.  I was gobsmacked to see that the complete roitisserie accessory is still there!  It's one of the first Electri-Clean ovens Frigidaire built; this would be an amazing addition to my Frigidaire kitchen in St-Liboire, even it meant giving up the 62 Flair! 

It's also the highly complicated "Tender Matic" oven... I'm going to have to do a whole lot of reading up on this to figure out how it was all supposed to work.  

I took off the back panel to examine the wiring/controls... I'm going to be bothering my buddies who are electrical engineers for this... LOL  There seem to be resistors, thermisters, coils, and lord knows, there may even be a flux capacitor in there!  

This will be quite the undertaking, but as with the dishwasher, I'm going to do my homework on this one before I start even trying to diagnose how it's supposed to work... 

 

[turquoisedude]

Some initial observations before I attempted to power it up:

 - the latch for the self-clean mechanism seems odd to me.  I could only get it so far and found it was difficult to get     to the knob used to select a self-clean cycle.  Further, that particular control seemed to be very stiff and I was not     able to move it easily

-  When I tried dialling an oven temperature, I will swear that I heard a clockwork 'ticking'

- I noticed the fan to the oven compartment.... Is this part of the "Tender Matic" system?

- I noticed an odd connection on a resistor (3rd picture).  It looks like a loop added onto the resistor body and the      wire from lord knows what was connected to the loop connector and not the terminal of the resistor itself. 

 

The issue that the person who found this was that the oven heat seems to be uncontrollable.   This seems very odd to me, as the range really does not appear to have had a lot of use.  But this is all terra incognito for me... hence why I'm cooling my jets and will wait to find service literature BEFORE I make any stupid mistakes! 

 

[pulltostart]

Paul,

She's a beauty!  Congratulations on getting this one and good luck with bringing her back to life.

 

lawrence

 

[combo52]

Frist FD Tender=Matic SCing Range

The fan is for cooling the range body durning SCing Cycle.

 

You need to have the range connected to power to lock or unlock the door.

 

The oven most likely has a bad oven responder, but check the oven sensor for 17.5 ohms and check for a stuck heat relay, then look for an oven responder before pushing the range to the curb.

 

I had the 40" version of this, never could get the oven to work properly, finally converted it to a hydraulic thermostat and gave the range to Steve Soloman for a canning range.

 

I now have another TOL 40" range with TM and have never even plugged it in, I do not expect the oven to work.

 

John L.

 

[circlew]

Paul, that's a really nice range. This style of Frigidaire is one of my favorites after GE and Hotpoint models of that time. When the high school I attended first opened in 1966, the home EC room had a Frigidaire 30" range in Turquoise, but it had a window, so not SC. Hope you get yours operating properly soon.

 

[kevin313]

Beautiful!!

Congratulations and enjoy!