The other evening I was writing a comment in another blog, and mentioned my Sunbeam Mixmasters, none of which are younger than fifty years old (I like antique Mixmasters; they run absolutely for-EVER.) I have a pair of Model 7Bs, probably made between 1946 and 1948. I don’t think either one is from the 1941 production run. One of them is my front-line mixer, and the other I keep for parts. It used to be my front-line mixer until it threw a bearing at last, a year or two ago. I also have two of what I thought were Model 1s—until I got to poking around at DecoDan’s Web site and found his Mixmaster identification page. To my surprise, my putative “Model 1”s actually predate the Model 1 (the first ten-speed mixer that Sunbeam made) by a year or two. The one that still works is a Model M4K, made sometime between June 1933 and April 1935, which once belonged to my grandmother, and which I rescued from her barn and had put back into running condition. The other one is a Canadian Model M4J, made sometime between September 1932 and May 1933, which is also a ‘hangar queen’ I keep for parts. Seeing how Sunbeam was just about run into the ground by mismanagement over the past few years, and even before that they were no longer making parts for anything this age, keeping a spare or two around is only prudent.
All the mixers, by the time I acquired ’em, had long since lost the bowls that went with them, and their beaters were mostly beaten, so I spent some time and money on eBay re-assembling the proper beaters and bowl sets to go with each; the M4s had jadeite glass bowls and juicer, while the Model 7s had bowls and juicer of milk glass. I’m still missing the pulp strainers and one of the juicer spouts, as well as the oil drizzler intended for making mayonnaise. Once upon a time I had a sausage grinder that worked from a PTO which snapped into one of the beater sockets, but it didn’t fit or work well (I later found out it was meant for a Model 10 or 11, which was a physically taller mixer), so I sold it off. I’ve got a perfectly good hand-cranked sausage grinder, anyway.
You have driven the island of Teneriffe around. Fnord.
