This story happened a long time ago and it is true as I remember it happening. On a Friday, just after noon, Joyce had finished making her special Christmas Chex mix. She had also finished kneading her dough and was letting it complete the second rise for her then famous homemade bread. We sat down to have a beer. The sun was shining, the air was fresh and all was well with the world. My luncheon beer was so good and so cold that I decided to have another one. Joyce had let the oven cool down from the higher temperature used on the Chex mix to a lower temperature for the bread. She walked over to the oven and opened the door to put in the bread. She reeled about in horror, proclaiming, “Bill my oven died!”
Now I had just opened that second beer and the last thing I wanted to hear was the oven had died. I would like to have heard that the bread was done and I should try a piece to see if it was ok. I got up from the table and walked over to the oven, looked inside and proclaimed, “Yes it sure did.”
Now at this time, Joyce, who was normally as cool headed as any good girl scout could be, suddenly went into nuclear meltdown. “Oh my goodness, what am I going to do? I have company coming this week. How am I going to cook a turkey for Christmas? How can I bake a pie?” There were other questions but by then I was no longer listening. I was thinking we had just paid our real estate taxes, our personal property taxes, bought Christmas gifts and the last thing we needed was to be buying a stove and getting it installed or be sitting waiting for a stove dude to show up and hopefully be able to fix it or even have the parts to do so.
I went into automatic mode. I thought I knew what the problem was; there is a white-hot igniter coil that lights off the propane in the oven and I did not see any light at all. If the coil does not light up, the gas flow is stopped. With that knowledge I figured all I needed to do was figure out how to get to the coil and then test it. That turned out to be a daunting task. I removed the metal plate on the floor of the oven and found the igniter coil was there, but the wires were not accessible until I removed the bottom storage drawer, laid on the floor and hopefully had arms long enough to reach back in there to get at the coil. Had the wires been any more buried I could not have reached them. I removed a cover to expose the wires and measured across the igniter. It measured 120 volts when the stove was turned on and that told me the igniter had an open circuit. Had the coil been good it would have measured near zero. Next I had to remove the coil, not an easy job. It was mounted in a narrow crevice with no clearance to get a wrench on it; so I had to remove the burner and lift it out. That involved removing some rusty old screws that were also difficult to get at and loosen. I managed to break the burner loose and had the prize in my hands. The operation involved more ups and downs off the floor and trips to find yet another tool than I could count. I had the defective part, but where would I get a new one? I put the stove back together so we could cook on the stove top. First order was to have another beer as that second one I had opened had sat for hours while I determined how to test and get to what I thought was the defective part. Joyce had a few glasses of wine through the afternoon and was way ahead of me.
Joyce cooked our supper on the stovetop, but she was still too upset to eat. She picked at her food; she was in no mood to eat while she was fretting over the upcoming week with company coming and cooking to do without her oven. I finished eating and then got up to see if I could find the part number on a computer search. I found one right away on an out of town site, but that involved shipping; that was not good this time of year with all the Christmas packages clogging the mail. I looked up four parts supply places in Springfield and felt confident one of them would have the part.
Saturday morning I awoke early, had some coffee and started to make some calls. The first place I called had the part, so I was off to Springfield on a 25 mile trip to pick up the part. That gave me about 45 minutes each direction to question my logic, troubleshooting and to mull over the thought of whether I would be able to get the burner back on correctly (I have some bad history with propane burners exploding on me and singing the hair off my head). It was a long roundtrip but I made it and started ripping the stove apart again.
I installed the new part, put the burner back in place and anchored it down. I picked myself up off the floor, moved to the side of the oven and turned on the switch. I stood there watching, waiting and nothing happened! I started to curse under my breath. The feelings of defeat were harsh. What went wrong? Then I had another thought; I knew the coil had to get white hot, but I never actually timed how long that took. Then I thought I could reach down there and just tap it lightly to see if it was warm at all, but what if it suddenly got hot enough to light off the burner? It was a chance I had to take so I reached in and barley touched the igniter. It was just warming and was starting to get hot. A half-minute later it began to glow orange, then white and the burner lit off beautifully. I was off the hook. Now it was a matter of would the oven work correctly and cook to Joyce’s satisfaction? That matter would be settled after a couple of beers while she baked a beef roast. She wanted to be sure the oven worked properly before it got any closer to Christmas. She started to finally chill out a bit when she got the first whiff of the beef cooking.
Several beers later, the roast was cooked; it was as tender and juicy as it could be and absolutely delicious. The sun came out; the day warmed up; children came out to play in yards and life was good again. I almost thought I saw a butterfly flitting about.
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