Stabbed In The Gut

[Ron]

The other night when I was cooking something, a lot of hot grease got accidentally spilled down into the oven. I didn't think much about it (such things happen), but whn I went to cook a few steaks today both top and bottom burners would only slightly heat up. The top burners were fine.

After I found a flashlight I looked into the oven and found some craacked material on the bottom of the oven that looked ceramic, but what really surprised me was that I found a small steel knife lying across the arms of the burner, maybe shorting the terminals. I don't know where the knife came from-- it had no wood or plastic handle-- just bare steel; the shank had three holes with rivets dangling in each hole. It's the strangest thing I have ever seen.

Not strange because it's a weird knife, but strange because I ha never seen it before and I don't know how it could sitting across the terminals like that; it sure wasn't there when I put in a new element just before Thanksgiving. Does anyone know what the hell is going on here? Why neither the bottom nor the broiler burners would work? And most importantly, how to fix this perversely silly situation?

Ron

[hrhofmann]

GHOSTS

[Ron]

Yeah... The way things go around here, that might be. But a more pragmatic response is appreciated. Like, how to get the burners working again...

Ron

[clare]

Remove the knife and replace the blown fuses in the stove -- IF you are lucky.

[Robert Green]

My guess is that's not a steel knife - it just looks like one. It was probably a knife-shaped support bracket underneath the ceramic material that burned off. Take a picture of the item and post it.

An unknown knife getting into you oven is odd enough - but not having any remnants of a handle pushes the odds of it being a knife into the "highly unlikely" range. It's actually a common mistake in human, machine and even dog intelligence. There is a tendency to almost always try to define objects in terms of something we've seen before. We expect the expected and sometimes force the unexpected into a past category when it's actually something completely new.

Examine the 'knife' more closely - try to find a diagram of the unit on the net.

-- Bobby G.

[Ron]

Uhh, some sources say that electric stoves don't have fuses...

Ron

[Ron]

22-

I was hoping you were right as that would make a lot more sense. But unfortunately, you seem to be dead wrong: examining the blade closely shows the words "Good Cook," a manufacturing company that makes kitchen supplies.

That makes no sense at all. I don't now what happened to knife's handle, I don't know where the damn thing came from or how it could possibly get down on the lower burner element and in the space of time between the last time I cooked with the oven and a day or so later when the oven isn't working. A mystery. And I hate mysteries.

Ron

[clare]

Every one I've ever owned has.

[aemeijers]

Your oven have a self-cleaning cycle? A wood-handled knife could easily burn off a handle over several cleanings, and only shorted out the works when the last bit of wood vaporized. Some types of plastic could as well, but most of those would stink like mad.

[Doug Miller]

And the smell of a wooden handle charring could easily be lost in amongst the smells of food spills being burned off.

[mm]

When a boy knife and a girl knife fall in love, they get married, and they have little knives, and that's where knives come from.

Gas oven or electric?

[mm]

He may have been referring to a gas stove.

I guess not. I just stripped an electric stove** down to all its constituent parts. Removed and saved, at least temporarily, all the electric parts. I didn't see any fuses. Where are they?

**32 years old.

[mm]

You're assuming it hasn't been down there for years. You're also asssuming it's the cause of the oven problems. It might not be, especailly if you have a gas oven.

[Ron]

'Sorry, I should have said up front electric stove.

Ron

[Ron]

It hasn't been there for years. As I said earlier, I had replaced the lower burner literally the day before [last] Thanksgiving. The stove wasn't new; it was given to us by somebody who thought it was a better replacement for the one we had--- but it wasn't.

That aside, this is a bizarre and utterly silly situation as the stove was working fine three days ago. And because I had spilled some hot grease inside, I thought there was a causal connection between the two events: the spilled grease and the burner not working. But a knife is not something that can be accidentally "spilled" anywhere: it has-- okay, it had-- to be *placed* there, especially right across the terminals of the burner. There are two people in the house, me and my

82 year-old mother, and she is affilicted with no sense of humor. It wouldn't occur to her to do something like that as a joke even if she could get down on the floor and put a knife there.

Sigh... Too damn weird for words.

Ron

[clare]

Last time I needed to replace one it was in a panel in the part at the top/back where the clock and controls are. That was in the stove we replaced a couple of years ago - It has about a dozen fuses (more than 6, anyway)

Just checked my new Frigidaire smooth-top and it only has 2 fuses - for the outlets - so it looks like some do, and some don't - and some "kinda do" These fuses are "under the control panel cover"

[mm]

Sorry. I missed that.

My weirdest story is quite different. In college in Chicago, I bought a fancy bicycle at a police auction. It even had a working speedometer. (Hot stuff in 1968.) When I moved to Brooklyn, I removed it from the bike, sold the bike, and took the speedo with me. A couple years later I wanted to install it on another bike, but the flexible metal cable inside the metal sheath wasn't there. I'm careful and I can't imagine how I lost it.

The next time I went to visit my mother, in Allentown Pa. she gave me a cable that she had found in a shopping center parking lot. When she had stopped to get it, her husband said, What do you want that for? She said, MM might want it. It fit exactly. I spent years trying to figure out if somehow I had stopped in Allentown on my way to Brooklyn and dropped the cable in the parking lot, where my mother found it years later. But I'm sure I didn't stop there, in addition to the other problems with that idea.

[Ron]

No... I made meatloaf a couple of days before and there was nothing but grease at the bottom of the stove; that was the only thing prone to burning. The oven is an old pice of junk that doesn't have self- cleaning, And unfortunately, it also doesn't have two working heating elements...

Ron