Project Tappan Oven Resto-Mod

This is my latest project.

It's a vintage Tappan oven that used to belong to my Grandmother. It's hard to get any specific information on it, but I do know that these things have some value among collectors. There's a great blog about called Tappan Talk. As best as I can tell the oven I have would be a model from the mid 1940's. 

It was made by the Tappan Stove Company based in Mansfield Ohio. We're not exactly sure how it got here but it was most likely imported by my Grandmother or her sister sometime in the late 40's early 50's. Many delicious American Style Apple Pies and Fruit Cakes would have been baked in this over the years. The Tappan was used up until the 80's to even the early 90's before being replaced with a modern oven, eventually it was stored away in the back of our house and has been in a state of disrepair for quite some time. 

Just this week we moved the Tappan to the factory where we could safely store it in the warehouse. Coming from our car restoration and modification background I could not help but see the potential it has. The oven body is not unlike a car body. Sheet metal over a metal frame. I decided it would be pretty cool to restore the vintage oven body. The original burners are still there although they look too far gone to salvage. I figured it would be pretty neat to retrofit it with modern oven internal bits, burners gas control and the like (I don't really know the exact terms yet, this is something I will have to learn). In short it's something that would end up not unlike my '79 Lancer. Vintage looks on the outside, but updated a bit with some modern technology. A Resto-Mod. 

 

The rust has gone through quite a bit of the structure. The hinges that hold the doors will all have to be repaired or replaced with custom fabricated hinges. 

The original stove top burners. The valves and related parts must be all dead. The plan would be to replace all the internals with modern stove parts and have the fire come out of the vintage grill. 

This is the baking portion of the oven. I have no idea if it's missing anything or not. But this will also be suitably modified with modern internals to work. 

Rust! I see this kind of rust damage on old cars all the time. I will likely have to call in our tinsmith to give this some new steel. 

It's all dirty in places that you don't normally see. Just like in an unrestored car. These are all going to have to be made nice and clean. 

I've wrapped up the Tappan in plastic and stored it nicely first while I do some research into what exactly needs to be done to get this project rolling. I'll update this as we go along. 

If you're curious about the monster behind it in the pics... 

That is a vintage pneumatic boring machine. Maybe a project or story for another day. 

Check the stylist before getting styled

My girlfriend told me over the weekend that she would never have her hair done by a hair stylist with ugly hair. That's the same reason why, tuning shops need to have a nice demo car and why if you sell furniture for a living you need to have the nice stuff at your own house too. You can't be credible if you don't walk the talk.

The reason I bring this up is that with the advent of all of these forums and even more recently facebook based car clubs it's a bit surprising how much misinformation is out there. It's fine of course if like me, you take everything you read online with a grain of salt. You find some new information, verify where it came from, do a little more research into it and learn. Sometimes it can be a ruse to send you off on a wild goose chase, like when I started looking into information I got about how to upgrade the Lancer's front disc brakes. Misleading- yes, yet while chasing around the proverbial goose we did learn new things and find our own way.

There are however people out there who are, as politically correct as I can put it, more trusting. They get advice and go with it, sometimes not bothering to check where it came from. That's alright if what they were told do do is right in the first place. But sometimes there are quite a bit of people out there who might seem to know a lot when they are posting about this and that, yet in truth they are just really adept at using Google or quite good at retelling stories they have heard from others.

Reading through discussions there are a few terms that pop up quite often. One that I always here is that a certain part or some bit of information car from this so and so who used to race. The big names that we all know aside of course, the funny thing is that quite often people don't ask.. 'yes he used to race... but did he win?' Case in point, a friend of mine bought a cylinder head for his Lancer for a certain someone who used to race. Big valves, double valve springs and heavily ported and polished it was said to be 'too wild to use on the street'. Sounds exciting right? However when we inspected it, the valve springs were not set in the proper retainers, the big valve conversion was so-so and the porting was so bad, I we figured that head would actually give less power than a stock one. Another things I always here is that the work was done by this guy who used to have a car shop. This is even scarier. Why used to? If he was good or even at least decent he'd still have one today (there are exceptions I know) but we've had work done on one of our cars from such a guy and I spent a good amount of time re-tightening all the bolts because after a little bit of driving things started to come loose (among quite a bit of other mess I had to fix after). The transmission bolts were barely hand tight.

So now you know, before you have your hair done, check to see if the stylist looks good.

Edit: I realized while re reading the article. How strange is it that not only do I do I work on my own car... I also style (well, shave is more accurate) my own hair. :P