Engineering and the Easy-Bake Oven (Part 1)

there is a lot to be said about an easy bake oven process.......

At the ship yard we had made an oven with a 200 Watt light bulb, and there is alot to be said about cooking your leftovers slowly........ with butter.

Filmmakers and Teamsters have used 2K Ianaros, with their scrims to heat up food for years.

I used to use something like that (ours was and old fridge) for reconditioning or keeping dry my MMAW electrodes.

Which use to also double to heat up my lunch in winter. haaa the day fridge heated lunches

OMG, how do you screw up the design of and Easy Bake oven to cause: "second- and third-degree burns and even a case of partial finger amputation"???

Did children design it? I know, it must have been the marketing department, they're a bunch of sociopaths anyway...

I guess the designers didn't take into account that children will stick their teeny, nimble fingers in anything they can find! I would have to WORK at burning myself with the Easy-Bake Oven I have!

We just bought one for our granddaughter. Both my wife and daughter grew up with Easy Bake ovens, and have fond memories. The new one doesn't work for diddly, it's hard to assemble, and it's 10X as expensive as it once was. She used it once, and we'll probably throw it away. It's a piece of Chinese crap with so many safety features, it doesn't work anymore.

Ron Howes probably died of shame, seeing what they did to his marvelous invention.

I used it twice and I am more than ready to hand it over to the Salvation Army! The nostalgic rush only lasted as long as it took for my vanilla cake to cool!

Darn good toy. Being a guy that loves to eat I loved the idea. Good thing my folks never bought me one. I would weigh twice what I do now. Although, I was making sausage gravy by the time I was 6. Biscuits came latter. Not because mom was afraid of me and the oven. Probably more afraid of the mess I would make. When I was little even guys learned to cook and do dishes early.

I use the easy bake idea for my paint and chemicals. I have an old fridge that I put a 40 watt lamp in during the winter. It is connected to an adapter I picked up at a farm store. Turns the light on around 40 deg F and off around 50 Deg F.

I saw this done first in a welding class for a make shift rod oven. It used a 150 watt bulb and no switch. You could not pick up the electrodes without gloves. Even with them you did not hold on to them for long.

Having grown up with Ron's son Chris, I can attest to all the fun stuff that was to be found in the Howes house!

It was a sad time to hear that our long time neighbor had passed. We had a fun time reminiscing about all the stuff we used to get into as children though!

That is so cool! Ron was quite the interesting guy and I was planning to write a blog about him. If there are any memories you would like to share, that would be awesome! :-)

In the basement super secret workshop there were various colors of phosphorescent colored powders that we would get into on occasion and mix with elmers glue. We would paint up stuff that would dry clear, but would be way cool in the dark!

That is my best memory of < gulp > 30 plus years ago!

That's so awesome!!! Thank you!!!

If you come up with any more memories, feel free to email them to me at mmannix@globalspec.com! :-)

Want to precede this by about 100 years? I think if you look at a turn of the (20th) century Wards catalog, you will find something called an Alladin oven. It used one kerosene Alladin ( or equivelent ) lamp, had a big metal housing that had to be lifted off of a table with a pulley and cord arrangment. They claimed you could cook an entire meal with the heat of the lamp. I wonder if any of these still exist in some barn for a picker to discover?

Cheers all!!

I built my own version of an easy-bake oven a few years ago to repair a sailboat rudder. The glass-epoxy coating had broken and the wood core of the rudder was saturated with water.

I took a cardboard appliance box large enough to hold the rudder, and hung a 100 watt drop-light inside it. I put a digital thermometer inside to monitor the temperature. I turned on the light, closed up the whole thing, and let it bake. The temperature overranged the thermometer (so I knew it was over 100 degrees, but not how much.) I checked it every once in a while to make sure I hadn't built a fire hazard. I let it run for days, until the unprotected wood was bone dry. There may still have been some water in the core, but I couldn't tell and couldn't really do anything about it. I repaired the break with glass epoxy and the rudder has been fine ever since.