Partly cloudy skies. Low near 65F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Partly cloudy skies. Low near 65F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.

Ten years ago, I bought an electric oven from a guy over in the Rindge, Jaffrey area of southern New Hampshire. I have always appreciated that area for its natural beauty. It was early spring when I went over to pick up my used electric oven. The guy’s house was beside a pond on a side street, and it was a huge old warehouse that at one time had a couple of apartments in it.

The place was a melee of building materials, ladders, drop cloths and tools. He was gutting it back to the studs and turning it into a big, comfortable man-cave of a house with a huge room for his pool table and lots of big windows looking over the water. The imagination applied to the warehouse rehab piqued my interest.

I started talking with the owner about the house, and he said they were moving from Lebanon, N.H., to his dream home. I asked him where he lived in Lebanon, only to learn that I had lived about a block away when I was there in the early 1970s. We knew a few people in common. It was a memorable visit, and the guy even helped me load the stove onto my pickup bed.

Electric stoves are just fine, but I prefer cooking with gas. This particular $40 used electric stove was going into my garage for a different kind of cooking. I planned to use it to cure powder-coated metal parts to restore cars and motorcycles. The process utilizes a spray gun to coat an electrically charged part with powder, which goes into the electric oven to melt the powder into a durable coating.

I had my garage prepped for the addition of the stove with a 220-volt line and receptacle. I built a wooden pedestal for the stove to keep it off the crushed stone floor of the garage. That was about the time that life got in the way, and I suddenly found myself too busy to deal with any of the projects I had waiting in the wings. No problem, the plan was to tackle most of those projects after retirement.

Now, over two years after retiring, I am working on a project requiring the re-coating of some metal parts. Powdercoating metal parts are exactly what is needed for one of my current projects. All I have to do is learn how to powder coat.

The first project is to coat a set of steel wheels in white. I have to remove them from the vehicle, then get the tires removed, sandblast the wheels, and see if they will fit into the electric oven. If it is not a fit, I will spray paint them, but I would prefer the durability of a powder-coat finish.

The equipment to do the coating came in a kit that I purchased from the Eastwood Company 10 years ago. Eastwood is a supplier to the D.I.Y. restoration market. The kit has been sitting in my non-heated garage for a decade, so hopefully, it is still in working order.

For years visitors have questioned why I have an electric cook stove in my garage. So there it sits, waiting to bake a cake or roast a turkey, yet its culinary days are over. Once you bake a steel part with powder coat, the stove is rendered unusable for cooking food forever, so do not try this at home with your kitchen cookstove. After 10 years of lying fallow, I am hoping that my easy bake home parts oven is up for the task.

The Morning Almanac with Arlo Mudgett is heard Monday through Saturday mornings on radio stations Oldies KOOL FM 106.7, 96.3, and 106.5 and over Peak-FM 101.9 and 100.7.

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