Opinions about new non-electric appliances

When I was younger my family had a self-sufficient cabin, complete with little luxuries like antique nonelectric appliances:
wall mounted oil lamps,  coffee grinder, fire toaster, popcorn popper, apple roaster, dutch oven with a compartment for coals so it could cook & travel, Victrola for music & so on.

Unfortunately these treasures are all gone now, we try to pic up second hand non-electric devices when ever we can...

But I know there are places that sell new versions of this type of stuff & I'm wanting to know what items are good & worth the price.
 
Please share your pinions about new nonelectric appliances & devices.

I would have to say that for us, the majority of our non-electric appliances come 2nd hand so they are the real Macoy so to speak. That said we do try to tweak them abit with modern technology. For instance I restored a 1930's ice box replacing the packed wood shaving inserts with insulation. If the non-electric applaince is for food we strip it & use food grade paint.
As for buying new well beauty & need is in the eye of the buyer in this case. The last & really only expensive new homesteading tool that we bought was one of those big Amish canner's from Lehman's. This was after years of looking at other alternatives such as resturant/industerial grade soup pots. Even researched having a local metal shop make one. I hemmed & hawed but as hubby pointed out canning 200 jars every season woudl go alot quicker done 15 qt. at a time instead of 7. Now I have canner envy due to thier new bigger version which holds 30 I think but is well over $200.
The last non-electric do-hicky I bought was a Colman's camp oven for baking on my woodstove from Wally World (I had a gift card). It needed some teaking to actually heat up to 350 degrees. Insulation provided by silicone hot pads laid on top & all the holes plugged with foil.
Last year I was able to visit Lehaman's. Actually seeing some of the items on my wish list help me decide on thier value. Pants stretchers & the james washer came off my list & a rapid washer put on which I did buy.
I have never seen a dutch oven like you described, now of course I want one.

Thanks for the in put pelenaka ,
I know there are so many neat things that they just don't make any more.

My dad just got an oat meal mill for rolling oats & other grains, it uses a crank, he sems to love it , rolls his own oats for breakfast every day. I think it came from Lehman's.

He also still has the old crank coffee grinder, one of the few things he saved from the cabin. He still uses that.

This summer my friend made a loaf of bread on hot coals in her dutch oven, it was a small loaf & she elivated it on an over turned cake pan place in the bottom of the oven. It came out great. 

Let me know what else you might discover.

Ive been pretty happy with most of my non electric items.The only dislikes Ive had have been with lehmans blender which really was hard to use but its been retooled now(must have been more than just me annoyed)and Alladin lamps which were really bright but also fragile,expensive,smelly,and totally dangerous if left unattended.

Hey Mt. Goat, long time no chat, I've been so busy , nice to have a moment to poke around in the forums again.

Was it a hand crank blender?
I
I've seen the ones you hook yo a stationary bike but I've not tried one.

Off all the non-elect. devices I've used my 2 fav's are the apple roaster & the travel dutch oven.

DH was in Gander mountain this week wandering around Rochester on his day off. He said he tried the hand cranked blender. His comment was that it hardly took any effort at all.
Owning one would be redundant since I already own 5 or 6 hand crank beaters. My fav being a pink number which matches my 50's kitchen. Oh the price was well over a $100.
If we were completly off grid I wouldn't mind having a victrola with a set of records. But I would also want a hand cranked radio.
Besides my collection of egg beaters, I have a salad master which cuts veggies in a different thicknesses or crinkle cut (great for prepping bushels of carrots when I can), a squeezo for tomato sauce( gift from an elderly neighbor), coffee grinder(part of hubby's dowery), & an apple peeler(new). We also own a grain mill (new$200 +), meat grinder/sauage stuffer(tag sale). Bought a bread bucket (for kneading) new but I don't use it as much as I thought I would.
Good sized collection of cast iron but would like to own bread pans. We also restored a small cider press.
Non-kitchen; clothes wringer (new scored on Craig's list) & rapid washer although I had made one from a new plunger, 3 sad irons (flea markets).  DH has 7 oil lamps.
In all honesty now when the Lehman's catalog comes there really isn't anything that makes us go wow, except that canner that I mentioned but I could never make it pay for itself here on my urban homestead.

shaker and amish supply stores sell non electric things that work very well..often they will carry the best as the people that buy them are going to demand the best..cause they USE them, they aren't just buying them for LOOKS or antique value.

sometimes antique items are still available..i had an antique meat grinder with all of the attachments for a long time..i still might have it in the garage packed away, but i think i lost it when we had our housefire..a lot of things were stolen after the fire

I use an old fashioned coffee grinder for some of my spices and I picked up several peppermills at thrift stores for other spices that I use on a regular basis to keep the mill filled, like coriander seed, mustards, peppers, etc. I also have one of the crank ice cream makers that we use. For a mill I love my little ark grain mill with the stone and metal burrs for corn and oilier seeds and such. I am picking up the flywheel that can be hooked to a belt, then attaching that to a pedal set up for grinding larger amount. I use a cast iron meat grinder to make my sausage and have the smaller cast iron grinder that I use for fruits and such. The only electric appliance we have is the blender, which I predominantly use to make my mayo and hummus. Everything else is done by hand.

The blender Im refering to is hand crank and was sold by lehmans for only a couple years before being totally redesighned.I probably was expecting too much from is.Mayo and hummus would be fine but I was hoping for something more powerful.

I have seen that blender listed and thought several times about getting it, but wondered if it would really be that cost effective to buy. I can make my mayo and hummus by hand and have, but since I have this blender and have had for over 20 years, I hang on to it till I go totally off grid or it breaks.

Just a thought on your lamps, in case you might be interested. In one of my archaeology reference books it talked about the oil lamps from Egypt, the Levant, Ancient Anatolia areas, that they just used castor oil or another oil with a hemp wick. This causes a wee bit of smoking, but some Egyptian priests found that by adding natron (sodium bicarbonate, aka baking soda) to the oil, it burned smokeless and did not add soot to their temple artwork. I plan on trying this shortly. I wanted to make a lamp similar to the ones that they used and make my hemp wicks to give it a try.

edit: forgot to add the other components of natron- mostly sodium carbonate (washing soda), about 17% sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), small amounts of sodium chloride (table salt) and sodium sulfate (used in laundry soap and paper processing). In Germany, baking soda is called natron and some recipes for natron just have the table salt (1 part) and baking soda (2 parts). One university said that natron salt was just the baking soda and table salt recipe. The table salt (not sea salt) has to be ground up to a fine powder.

OMG!thats probably the best info Ive gotten on this site.I hope it works because all of my renters use vegi oil lamps and watching the soot build up on my wood ceilings has given me great pain so I have to coat everything with stain so I can wash it later.I personaly use paraffin oil lamps so I dont get soot in my lungs.Thanx!Here is how we make the lamps:Use a 3"tall wide mouth jar(salsa style).strip the copper wire out of electrical wiring.Wrap it around a pencil or smaller diameter object(depending on wick size).This part holds the wick.Create a base that will sit on the bottom of the jar and hold the wick holding part vertical.Thick hemp twine for the wick.Place in jar,fill with free(or purchased)vegi oil and you got light.One 4gal container of clean resturaunt oil(hopfully free)should last a couple of years.The biggest problem is you have to raise the wick regularly and keep the oil level high.Use a tincture bottle dropper to add oil regularly and you can put rocks in the jar so oil turnover rate is higher.

The wick holding part and the stablizing base are all the same peice of copper.Any ?

Mt.goat, is the oil lamp like this?

YES!that is pretty close.I personally havnt used them much because I scored 30gal of lamp oil parafin for $150 10yrs ago and will probably run out after this winter.I will switch to vegi oil then but the soot thing was really causing me discomfort.Our lamps are shorter with an exposed flame.A jar around the flame would be safer but I wonder about the ease of raising the wick or refilling?Glad you have a way to post pics!

does the baking soda mix with the oil or sit on top?  I can't envision it mixing...

very cool if it works!

Trying to find my copied notes, but this was about a year and a half ago and I cant find the file with the Egyptian notes. But after doing a net search, I did find other people making references to the oil being castor oil, which I edited in the previous post and forgot to add the other components of natron, which are edited also. I do remember that the natron salt was mixed with the oil, but no recipe was given, so I was going to start small and add till I saw no soot. Since this type of lamp can be made with a canning jar, I think that I am going to try this tomorrow and see if I can get the ratio worked out. I have castor oil from a soap making supplies. I will let you know.

SouthEastFarmer wrote:
does the baking soda mix with the oil or sit on top?  I can't envision it mixing...

very cool if it works!

A little sodium goes a long way in making the flame brighter. My guess would be that a very slow reaction, resembling soapmaking, produces a tiny amount of glycerin and sodium salts of fatty acids, plus some carbonic acid which evaporates as water and CO[sub]2[/sub].

Another option if you don't want or have the copper wire is to take an aluminum can (preferably one that doesn't have the 5 cent deposit) and cut the bottom off about half an inch or so from the bottom.  Poke a hole in the bottom that will hold your wick.  You now have a floating wick holder!  No matter how much or how little oil there is, your wick will be held just the right height above the oil.

I also salt my wicks, by soaking them in a solution of table salt and borax, then drying them.  This also helps keep the smoking down.

I forgot to soak my wick in the salt solution last night, so I had to do it this morning and it is drying now, while I strip the wiring. I also saw a floating wick base made out of a bottle cap. By dinner this should be ready to test out and see if the "natron" helps to stop smoking. Then it will just be a matter of testing various oils. While castor bean may have been readily available to the Egyptians, I would like to see if other oils will burn as well, some more cost effective than olive oil, which is also not able to be grown in these parts.

Here it is. I used 1/2 cup castor oil, 1/4 tsp baking soda and 1/8 tsp ground up table salt mixed together. I made the wick out of cotton crochet yarn, three strands braided together, that I soaked 1/2 hr in a heavy salt water solution, wrung out (well pinched out because it is small) and then salted with the fine salt powder I ground in my mortar and pestle for the natron mix. I let this dry, brushed off excess salt and then dipped in the oil and natron mixture, threaded it through the coiled part of the copper stand I made for the jar. I made the handle to drape outside the jar so that I could easily pull it up to raise the wick when needed. After lighting it, I held a white sheet of printer paper about a foot above it for 10 minutes, no soot. I have been watching this thing for over 15 minutes and there is no smoke. I was even worried, because the castor oil in the bottle was over 5 years old, but no problems.





Coincidentally, I saw an ad on craigslist for Bozeman Biofuels, where they are selling triple filtered vegetable oil for 2.00 a gallon. Some of the websites for the vegetable oil lights mentioned that you could use used vegetable oil for the lanterns. I sent an email asking if he knows if this filtered oil is safe for breathing if burned in these lanterns. It might be a very inexpensive source of oil for this type of lighting and very timely now that I know how to make them. Mt. goat, thanks for mentioning it. This gave me the chance to finally test out that Egyptian priest information. Woohoo.

Thanx Kathryn for your efforts and others for their wick info.I will try this out at some point!

I have a hand-cranked wringer (bought from Lehman's) that works just as well as the one my mother used to use when washing for five children.  Their scrub boards are good quality, too, but the galvanized double laundry tubs are very thin.  I'm keeping my eyes open for a better-quality set of used laundry tubs.

I really like anything made of cast iron, and have a camp dutch oven as well as several fry pans and a chicken fryer.  I've never seen a dutch oven such as was described above, though, with a compartment for coals so you could carry it along while traveling!  I'd love to see a picture!

Another thing I have that I like, while not an appliance, is my grandmother's old enameled muffin tins.  They work well, and things are much less likely to stick in them than in our more modern ones (I use the muffin tins a lot because usually gluten-free breads work better as muffins than when baked in a loaf pan). 

Oh, and I also have my (other) grandmothers old treadle sewing machine.  I had some work done on it, and it works just fine now, even though it's almost a hundred years old.  It doesn't do a back-stitch, but it's almost as fast to just turn the piece around twice to fasten the stitches.  I learned to sew on a treadle machine when I was about eight years old, and enjoy treadling away!  I also do quite a bit of sewing by hand, but my eye-sight is starting to put a crimp in that.

Kathleen

Lehman's catalog just came out and I noticed that they now have a hand operated oil press. Since oil for cooking is something I have up to now been unable to produce has anyone tried one?

Robert, that model of oil expeller is a Piteba, made in Holland. Here is their website for info. I have been looking for one of these in the US, which are just now becoming available. I have read reviews of them for years and they are always good. They have been used heavily in India and Africa, well before showing up here in the US.

http://www.piteba.com/eng/index_eng.htm

Here is a youtube clip of it being assembled and using hemp seed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko-IW8SdcKY

Another with sunflower seeds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NoTxSa_tk

Thanks Kathryn,
Now can I justify the purchase...........................

Robert, I found the piteba oil expeller for 120.00 through a distributor in WA that is on ebay. That is over 60.00 cheaper than Lehman's. In my opinion, any hand tool that enables you to take control of your food production is worth it and I will be picking one of these up. For years I kept trying to find one here, even downloaded a guys plan on how to make an oil expeller with a bit of welding, but really liked the piteba model. Now they are here.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Piteba-Nut-and-Seed-Oil-Expeller-Oil-press-/110569458445

this makes me think
biodiesel from acorns?
or any other "low value" nut or seed crop?
could be realy useful

I want to learn how to make olive oil.  Sounds like they're too "wet" to use in this expeller.

I just wanted to add that I LOVE my squeezo (bought from ebay).  It is so much better (easier and faster) than a food mill.  So far I have used it to make blackberry jelly, juice fruits for wine making, juiced watermelon at the end of the season rather than letting them go bad (put in freezer bags and made ice cubes for drinks - recently thawed some and warmed it as a drink - yum), and made tomato juice.  There are different sized strainer tubes that do different things, but so far we have accomplished much with the same strainer tube.

I also love my apple peeler/corer/slicer.  We have used it on apples, potatoes and pears.  For the apple, we use it before making applesauce.  Then the cores and peeling have made apple cider vinegar or fed pigs.  For potatoes, I just rotate the corer down and use it for peeling.  For pears we core and peel them and then make a knife cut down the whole pear which creates great slices for dehydrating.

When we had a cherry tree that was producing huge amount of cherries, we really enjoyed our cherry pitter (much faster than our paper clip used to be).

Currently, we are really enjoying our smokehouse with an offset firebox for cold smoking.  Yum!