Short power cable

[Bill]

I still have the old kettle in readiness here for the next time I have to steam a long piece of timber. It has a rim where the lid fits. I slip the layflat polythene tube over this rim, tie the string round to keep it in place, thread the tube over the timber, plug in the kettle with its old round plug and off it goes. Refill water as necessary through the spout. As it was winter we used old pyjamas as insulation around the tube. Pine vapour makes you woozy.

We did the boat timbers this way, horizontal so they would bend around the frames while still hot.. The last rubbing strakes we stood in the kettle outside the shed and it worked like a steaming flagpole..

Modern kettles, pah!

[damduck-egg]

Straight into the sink where you were washing up.

Last one I actually used I nobbled so it could no longer eject, we were running a 240volt kettle on 110 volt supply as using that crude method it heated the pitch nicely before it got poured into a silver tea pot whose spout had just right shape to pour into the plank seams of a boat deck we were caulking. The kettle must have been nearly 50 years old and suffered our abuse for a considerable time. The owner of tea pot was pretty peeved when she found what we had used it for though.

G.Harman

G.Harman

[Andy Burns]

For the George Elmy (hopefully you watched them) I noticed Fred had a few wallpaper steamers to power his steamboxes ...

[Dave Liquorice]

If there is any more cable you won't need a screwdriver to get at it.

As others have said it's so kettle is out of reach of children whose parents can't be arsed to keep their young children out of the kitchen or warn them of the danger "kettle, hot, don't touch" or the namby pamby ones who refuse to use the word "no" to their child in case it devalues the childs self essteem. They'll steam alright with a kettle full of boiling water over 'em... Modern kitchens tend to have sockets every three to four feet along the worktop runs so a "short" lead isn't a great issue in the main.

[Dave Liquorice]

B-)

Only those with a "put in on in any orientation base". The £6 Tesco jobbie we have ATM has what looks suspiciously like an IEC male mounted

vertically into the base of the kettle. ie the pin size and arrangement

looks like it but there is no shroud.

[charles]

there has been a change. When we moved into our first house, there was only one (15A) socket in the kitchen, situated so the kettle lead would have to cross the gas cooker to find a worktop.

our present kitchen, fitted by me in 1988, has 4 double sokctes above the worktop and 3 doubles elsewhere in the room, as well as dedicated sockets for fridge, dishwasher, extractor fan, boiler and waste diposal unit.

[Brian Gaff]

Don't know but toasters, kettles and even one microwave seem to have been short changed with cable recently. In the case of a toaster, I can see that a looped lead could get burned through, but a kettle?

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Actually many jug kettles seem to have captive leads on the bases these days.

Brian

[Davey]

Yes, thanks all. I found the extra coiled-up cable once I had good daylight rather than electric light. It's not much more cable, but it's enough. The house is very old, so doesn't have a modern power-point layout, and this is important. The old cable was still longer than this one, but it's ok now.

[whisky-dave]

I hate it when they do that, why bother if the picture isn't the product !

[Graham.]

And even if there was you would need more than one screwdriver. The manufactures have to keep up their "no user serviceable parts" pretense.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I still have one that's working fine, although it's not the main kitchen kettle for some time now. It's 30 years old, and it does still clean up well, looking almost new except for one small dent. Years ago (probably very shortly after I got it), I replaced the flex with a spiral/sprung one (the big round connectors are rewirable). That means it stretches for filling under the tap, without excess flex snaking around the worktop afterwards.

I've never tripped the overheat stat on it.

Yes. I sometimes have to clean the contacts on those, to make them work again.

[Graham.]

It doesn't even make sense. The fact that it's illustrative seems to me to reinforce the belief that it *does* pertain to the product.

"Emergency telephones not in use". That's good, you wouldn't want to wait while somebody else was using it.