It's that cooker time again

I recorded our last adventure with the cooker door on 18th January 2013. I restrain myself from correcting the various typos in this posting; a posting is supposed to be a record of the time of the post, not the record as I see it some time later. Irritated that my proof reading was so sloppy, but feeling good that I have let the poor product stand; very virtuous of me.

But the one year maintenance agreement on the cooker has now expired and one of the two screws which hold the handle to the newish door has come adrift. A quick inspection suggested that putting the screw back was beyond me and that the way forward was to phone the call center responsible and complain about doors that last just about long enough for their maintenance agreement to expire and wouldn't they like to do something about it for free. On reflection, I thought that this was a bit lazy and that getting a man in a van to attend to such a matter was not a good use of resources, whoever paid for them. Closer inspection suggested that a bent screwdriver might be the solution, a solution which had the advantage that instead of doing something now, I could defer doing anything while I played with Amazon. Who had indeed heard of bent screwdrivers and could do a set for £4.99 including postage, a lot less than a man in a van. They turned up few days later, and very smart they looked too, despite this A.B.Tools being nothing to do with the serious looking operator at http://www.abtoolsinc.com/, one of those websites which reminds one what a serious country the US still is. They still make lots of things.

No excuse now not to do something with the door, so I get down to it, to find that the bent screwdrivers do not quite do the job: not only do they not fit in the space available, they are surprisingly awkward to use. However, the good news is that while flapping around with the awkward screwdrivers, I worked out that maybe I could take the door to pieces and screw the handle back on with a regular screwdriver. Which I then do, and by the end of the process I have worked out it what order I should have done things. Will do much better next time.

I can also add further design thoughts to those of the original post. The hinges of the door and the way that the hinges are fixed to the door are not really up to the weight of the door, quite heavy with its frontal glass slab, and the firm sprung latch. The door needs a firm push to make the latch work, a bit like an old fashioned slam carriage door on the railway in that respect, so what with that and the weight of the door, one should have a more serious hinge assembly than is in fact the case - although I do allow that the fixing of the hinge to the body of the cooker is satisfactory.