Every now and again we come across a cooker that has been 'resurfaced'. This is a kind of acrylic thick paint finish. It's applied on site over several days, costs only a little less than re-enamelling and is frankly awful. The heat discolours it, cleaning is impossible and the 'before' pics are the end result! Fortunately no cooker is beyond help. In this case, along with re-enamelling we converted the cooker to our 'Electrikit' system from it's original gas burner system. Obviously this takes a lot of preparation 'off-site' (roughly 75% of the work on these jobs is done before we arrive) but the actual work in the kitchen on this job was only approx 6 hours - the cooker was ready to cook dinner on the same evening! There is more info with each pic and, as ever, the badge has been digitally removed as its a trademark.
Enamel is, effectively, colour glass melted onto iron. It's shiny and smooth. You know if you have a 'resurfaced' cooker as the its a 'matte' finish and if you run a finger nail or scraper across it catches - the paint is soft. You can see the heat staining around the doors very clearly and where above the doors how grimy it has become. Cleaning is impossible!
You may have already noted that this is a post-74 'Deluxe' cooker but did you notice that it has no flue?! This is called a 'balanced flue' model and the flue goes directly out the back through the wall so no vertical flue is necessary. The roasting oven door is showing how poor the acrylic surface - it looks awful with heat damage.
Aha there is that balanced flue I was talking about, it goes straight through the rear wall. When we convert a cooker it is dismantled down to the base leaving only the side panels, rear panel and tie rods in place. The insulation you can see is that which goes beneath the ovens. We don't use any 'loose' insulation like vermiculite; the ovens are lagged by hand with mineral fibres for maximum efficiency.
Haha, skipped a lot of steps here, the cooker is effectively finished! It has been completely re-enamelled and looks fab with new black top and green front. Even the thermometer is new. You can just see the control panel for the electric system in lower left of shot. At this point the cooker is already coming up to temp; the top oven is 109 degrees already in this shot - it will be ready to cooker supper later! The two dials to the right hand side of the temperature readout are to control the hotplates.
Ooooh, non-stick lid liners. Sleek gorgeousness! This is something you can do yourself...see here.
