Food Mixer James May: The Reassembler

Hello, viewers. I'm James May and this is The Reassembler,

the show where we take everyday objects in their component form

and put them back together very slowly.

That feels very nice.

Oh, yes, look at that.

'It is only when these much-loved and iconic objects are laid out in

'hundreds of bits...'

Oh, man in heaven.

'..and then slowly reassembled

'that you can truly understand and appreciate

'how they work...'

Total rubbish.

'..and just how ingenious they are.'

It's good, isn't it?

'And, if painstakingly putting hundreds of pieces back together again...'

That's quite satisfying.

'..wasn't hard enough, I then have to hope...'

Deep joy.

'..that they'll work.'

There's some moisture on my spectacles

because I've started weeping.

Today, I am going to assemble a chocolate cake

and the ingredients are

milk, flour, sugar, butter, cocoa powder, capacitor, choke resistor,

single phase A/C electric motor, planetary gear,

intermediate and penultimate gears, pinions, shim washers,

aluminium die castings, a light dusting of screws and washers,

and two eggs.

Back in the '50s,

the kitchen was being transformed by all manner of new and exciting

time-saving devices and electrifying machinery.

And being able to mix cake batter quickly was of utmost importance to

housewives everywhere.

The KitchenAid may have revolutionised fast cake mixing

but it was the Kenwood Chef A701A,

which emerged in the 1960s, that took it one step

further, with its multifunctional attachments and its sleek lines.

It became a cornerstone of modern living.

These are the 235 components of a Kenwood Chef A701A food mixer.

A literal revolution,

hundreds of them per minute, in fact, in domestic cooking

and I'm going to put them back together.

And we're going to start with electric motor,

since that is what separates this from the pestle and mortar.

So, I'll need the armature, a fan, some coils, the casing,

a couple of brush holders and brushes, and three wavy washers.

That should keep me going until you turn over to a soap.

Now, you are going to have to bear with me a bit on this one because

when the office said, "What sort of food mixer

would you like to reassemble?"

I said, "What's a food mixer?"

It's completely uncharted territory,

although it does contain some things that I know about - electric motors,

a bit of soldering, I imagine.

Screws, washers, you know, all that stuff.

As a younger man, I used to think - wouldn't it be funny if there was

actually somebody in the world called Ken Wood,

which wouldn't be an uncommon name,

and he happened to be a chef so he became Ken Wood, chef?

It turns out that Ken Wood,

I thought it was Sir Alexander Kenwood, but it's not.

He was called Ken Wood, so he named his company Kenwood.

I think he also had a boat that he named Kenwood.

The basic idea of an electric motor is very simple.

You put electricity in one end, and it rotates the shaft at the other,

and that's it.

You can then take the shaft and attach it to whatever you like.

And once I've finished constructing this motor,

I'll connect ours to the paddle,

which will mix our chocolate cake mix.

SNAP

Oh, yes, that feels rather good.

That's a fantastic invention.

Imagine all the things that would be incredibly tedious hard work.

We'd have no power tools...

..no electric cars,

no electric trains.

'And I'd be reassembling a bowl and a wooden spoon,

'which would be even less interesting than this.'

So, there is still a little bit more of electric motor to do,

which involves a bit more casing, that bit,

plus we need two more washers...

..and two more screws. That will probably do for now

because I'm...this will take me a while.

It did take a while, but, one hour and seven minutes after I began,

the motor is almost assembled and the casing in place.

Now I can attach the fan,

which also helps regulate the speed of the motor.

Now, this is secured with a grub screw.

It's going in with an Allen key and it's going to be an imperial size,

I'm guessing, as this is British and quite old.

But I have a set, magically.

The imperial system harks back to...

..in many cases, divisions of the human body.

So, the foot was a foot.

The inch, I think, was originally the end of somebody's thumb,

and so on, and so on.

The metric system is, in essence, divisible by ten.

The imperial system, its advocates would argue,

is great because it is divisible by more numbers.

So, if you had a shilling,

it is quite easy to divide into two people's worth of money,

or three people's or four people's.

One of the things I do like about the imperial system is that...

..it's more conversational, if you like -

a lot of it is more easy to relate to, you can say,

"Oh, we missed it by half an inch."

You can't really miss something by 12 and a bit millimetres.

The imperial system is

almost dead, really, for most things.

I'll close the lid on the imperial system and put it gently to rest.

On top of the... small metric spanners.

Right.

I'm now just going to sit here and drink my cup of tea for a while

because every other one I've had in this series has gone cold.

This is metric tea.

Next up is the speed control unit of my food mixer.

For this, I'll need a switch, a couple of retaining screws,

a mounting plate, and a capacitor.

That's a capacitor.

Blow my head off later.

That's a...

Holy Moley, look at all this.

There's going to be some soldering in a minute.

I hate soldering. Do you know what?

Looking at this thing, I am quite curious to use one.

There's a great advert that says...

I hardly dare repeat it for fear of getting my balls kicked off by

the sisterhood. I'm not saying this, I'm quoting the advert,

which is from the '60s, I believe.

And it says something like,

"The Kenwood Chef does everything except the cooking,

"that's what wives are for."

But just to reiterate, I'm not saying that,

I'm not saying I agree with it, I don't agree with it,

I'm merely quoting it.

It's a historical document.

I can also tell you some things that Hitler said,

it doesn't mean I'm a Nazi, it just means I happen to know what he said.

Now, I can clip these bits together and attach the capacitor.

It's sort of like a little temporary battery.

It stores a bit of electricity and releases it when you need it.

That's a fairly reasonable definition of a capacitor.

That's why they are

a bit dangerous to muck about with

because you can think you've turned something off and you have,

and there's no electricity going into it

but there is some electricity hiding in it.

It's like a little electrical booby-trap.

Get in, you horrible metal.

I think we may be approaching...

..the inevitable hour -

which is what Thomas Gray might have been talking about had he gone to

an electronic workshop rather than a country churchyard -

we're going to have to do some soldering.

I've just had a thought.

I've been given... I've been dying to try this out,

I've been given this, this is a gift,

and I suspect it's been given to me

with the intention of making me look like a total knob,

but what it is, it's a head-mounted magnifying system,

so you get...

..you get a selection of lenses...

You must put your glasses on to read the thing

that tells you what size the lenses are.

2.5. I'm going to try 2.5.

So I can't see a thing over there, but if I look down there,

wow, that's amazing.

There's a light on it, isn't there? Somewhere.

How do you switch that on?

Is that...? Yeah, look,...

How cool do I look?

If I wear it down the pub, will I score, do you think?

I can't work out where the cup of tea is.

THEY ALL GIGGLE

'This is not only about looking good,

'it's also about accurate soldering

'of capacitor to speed controller plate.'

That's brilliant. Look at that,

that's the best soldered joint I've ever done.

After a jaunty four hours and 23 minutes,

I've built the A/C motor and added the fan and the on-off switch.

I've also reassembled the speed control board and attached it to

the motor, so I can move on.

Though, as the motor is, it is just a motor with a rotating shaft,

it needs to transfer all that drive to the gearbox and everything else,

so that requires a belt system. A toothed belt.

We don't need the belt yet but we do need the belt pulley,

that little retaining ring...

..these four screws.

So this is the drive belt pulley, which mounts on the other end of

the motor with a roll pin.

This is going to be slightly tricky

because you would normally have a roll pin squeezer

to do this, which I don't have, so we'll improvise slightly.

The first Kenwood Chef...

..was launched in 1950.

"Eye appeal is buy appeal," said Ken Wood himself.

He recognised, quite early on, actually,

that attractive domestic appliances would sell better than ugly ones.

And we still see that today, with designer fridges and

those trendy Italian tin openers and lemon squeezers

and what have you.

And the first one sold out within a week, from Harrods.

It was probably considered quite a posh thing

because I think, in today's money,

it cost the equivalent of something like £600.

I think that has lined up.

Let's try squeezing it with pliers,

even though my instincts tell me that's not quite right.

Ah, there you go, that's bloody perfect.

That is the entire electric motor,

the belt pulley and the speed control unit

and the connection to the mains

complete. And, more joyously,

we can move onto something that I like and understand - the gearbox.

News has just reached me from the sadists who put this programme together

that I haven't finished the electric motor, there are some other bits,

so we'll do that again.

Well, that's the electric motor almost finished,

just a few more bits to put on.

I can joyously head back to the table

to get the final bits of the motor.

I can then blissfully attach the knob

and Ken's name badge to finally complete the A/C electric motor.

That is the motor and the controls and the knob and the connectors all

definitely finished,

and we can move on to something I'm much happier with - the gearbox.

I'm looking forward to this bit.

There is no soldering in it, for one thing.

Now I'm going to remove from the table everything in this line here,

which is the gearbox, and I like the idea of the gearbox

because I understand gears.

They can be considered levers in circular form.

They're important if you ride a bicycle, drive a car,

have a food mixer...

..play Spirograph, all sorts of things.

Look at that lovely thing.

I know that's going to feel nice with some grease on it somewhere.

Hours of fun.

Hours.

What I find interesting about gears is this shape on the teeth,

that has taken a long time for humankind to arrive

at a shape that meshes like that.

It's extremely complicated, actually,

if you analyse it right down to the Euclidean details.

That is the legacy of many,

many centuries of refinement and thought in geometry, metalworking...

..arithmetic.

Amazing. Anyway...

How does it go together? Let's find out.

This bit, I'm guessing, given that that has an annular gear,

is an epicyclic of some sort

because I know, when the food mixer goes round and round,

it goes round whilst going round, it is epicyclic,

it is something going round inside something that is in itself

going round. Erm...

So, I imagine there will be some planetary wheels inside there,

and some sort of sun arrangement.

I'm fairly confident that that goes in there.

That runs in a nice bush.

I'm still going to put a slight smear of grease on it.

We'll make this the greasing finger.

Oh, look at that going down.

I'm wondering if this is as interesting to watch on television

as it is for me to do because, when you sit down at the bench

with that pile of bits, you think,

"Oh, God, how am I going to work this out?"

But then, once you start doing it,

it's a bit like a chess problem or something,

you know there must be an answer...

..and you just have to work it out.

And I believe I have gone some way to working it out,

so I'm feeling incredibly pleased with myself.

Now, look,

you'll want me to say something about how I love using lubricant

or something like that, I know you do,

and then you can tweet about it and go, "Oh, he said..."

So, I'm not going to.

Having said that,

lubrication is incredibly important...

..if things aren't to wear out,

overheat, be destroyed by friction.

The interesting thing about oil and grease -

the oil in the engine of your car, for example -

because the oil is there,

no two metal parts actually touch each other.

They are separated by oil,

and the layer of oil could be a molecule thick, even.

But if you take the engine of a car...

..it will last for, what, 200,000 miles, that's not unusual.

If you ran it without any oil in it,

it would probably last maybe a minute.

That's how important oil is.

What it is making me think, actually, as I do this, is

how difficult and sophisticated cooking are you making

all those cake mixes and batter and whatever else must have been.

Well, here's the thing. This is what bothers me.

Labour-saving, it started with things like this,

so cooking becomes easier, mowing the lawn becomes easier,

getting about becomes easier because we have bicycles and motorcycles and

cars and so on. And then we had the digital revolution.

And then...

the microprocessor and the computer meant that we could work out

fantastically complicated things and produce charts and diagrams and

drawings that would have taken days or weeks to do on a drawing board or

with a piece of paper and a pen,

and there is all this time being saved by all these things

but where's it gone?

By rights, we should all be sitting at home

learning to paint or play the violin or philosophising or something,

but we're not. We're still running around like idiots,

tending to the very machines that were supposed to save us.

Where is all this time we were promised?

Where is the leisure society?

It's full of people having heart attacks.

Time-saving devices free up time to spend

with other time-saving devices,

like video games, or reassembling things,

which worked perfectly well before somebody took them apart.

In the interest of reassembling this previously perfectly good thing,

I just need to apply some silicon sealant,

then I can fit the two halves together.

That is together. You can tell that is together because the silicone is

evenly squeezed out all around.

We can go ahead and put the screws in, though.

But what a pleasing thing that is, isn't it?

And it is more pleasing for knowing what's going on inside it.

You have seen all of those inner workings,

all those mysterious bits that most people never see

and never even imagine.

What you see is just a paddle going around and around and around,

stirring up cake mixture, it's fairly boring, really.

But once you have seen it

in its nakedness, disassembled, and you've had to put it back together,

you know what's actually going on,

you'll never look at one of these in the same way again, and say, "Ah,

"yes, that's going to be some chocolate brownies,

"thanks to a planetary gear system."

That is a nylon washer.

That is the securing nut, which will have to be nipped up.

I thought that was five eighths, it's not quite, but anyway.

That's the main gearbox-y bit of it done.

I enjoyed that.

Mechanisms.

They're nice.

Super.

'In the mere blink of an eye,

'which just happened to last for seven hours and one minute,

'I've rebuilt not only the motor but also the gearbox,

'which I now have to fill with grease

'to ensure that all those moving parts

'remain lubricated for the next 50 years.'

One, two, three, four, five, six,

seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

It could be a new form of aerobics.

Right, that is the gearbox and the motor complete.

They are quite esoteric, really.

We can now move on to bits that start to make it look like something

you would expect to find in your kitchen,

namely, the pedestal, as it's called,

the sort of chassis of the thing.

Evil-looking spring, look at that.

The motor housing.

And...these bits.

Follow me.

Now, this next bit, I'm advised, can be a bit tricky.

This is the little arm that stops

the whole thing falling apart completely

when you open it up.

I'm sure it has a name,

I don't know what it is.

That will go through there, through the spring.

And you have to...keep the spring out of the way...

..while that goes on.

Piece of cake.

I don't know what all the fuss was about.

Watch as this becomes even more of a Kenwood mixer.

There is a tube to go inside it.

That will go like so.

And, then, the pin...

..would feed through from that side

until that groove for the circlip

appears on the other side,

which I think it just did.

I am now going to mount the motor assembly.

So, let's...

It can only go one way round because the knob...

..goes through the hole.

I think that, erm,

we may have arrived at an important moment.

CLICK

That is quite pleasing. There's a hell of a spring in there.

Now, I do believe we can put the gearbox assembly onto there.

Now, that really does look like a food mixer, then, doesn't it?

Without taking a modern food mixer apart,

I don't really know how different it would be from this one.

The mechanical aspects of it, I imagine, would be exactly the same

because gears are gears.

I mean, the thing is we have this idea that stuff in the past

lasted a long time but that is because we can only see the stuff

that's lasted a long time,

we forget about all the stuff that

we threw away because it was rubbish.

So, it could be that,

in the '70s, food mixers were built to last a long time

and it might be that today...

..kitchen knives are being made of steel

that will sharpen forever and last

a very long time so that another generation can say,

"Oh, this isn't made properly, not like it was in the good old days.

"Look at my old kitchen knife, I've had that for 50 years."

Yes, you have, but everything else you had 50 years ago is long gone to

landfill because it was rubbish.

Most of us only really know what happened based on what we can see,

so, therefore, Medieval England was just full of cathedrals.

It must have been amazing.

It could be that the thing that survives is...

..the reassembler.

And if that is all that archaeologists can find in 50,000 years' time,

they will say, "It was a strange age of man when people put things together,

"we're not sure what these things were, one of them was a food mixer.

"It lasted 50 years, you know. They don't make them like they used to."

Let's go and get a few more pieces.

It is very, very close now to being complete.

I'm going to need the belt to transfer the drive

from the motor to the gearbox.

This plate.

This plate.

And that.

And that's it.

Right.

That is a tooth belt,

that is a little bit like the final drive of a large Harley-Davidson.

That's looking quite good.

CLUNKING

That makes a good comedy noise, doesn't it?

Goo-glug.

That goes on top...

Thus.

And, now...

..the crowd goes quiet as the flex is thread

through the hole at the back of the Ken Wood...

mixer.

So, that cable is twice clamped,

just in the back of the machine,

as, of course, it will also be clamped in the plug.

You could probably swing from a suspension bridge by this machine

and you'd be absolutely fine.

CLICK

That's so satisfying.

Nice, big clunky noises.

That's a big clunky noise.

We are moving onto parts of the machine now that help, really,

to cement its identity,

the identity being the work of Sir Kenneth Grange,

the designer who did not only this

but things like the Kodak Instamatic,

I think he did a radio.

Most famously, he did the InterCity 125 train,

the shape of it, and the cab, I believe.

And that was a fantastic-looking thing.

This is what the future looked like when this was designed.

It was quite minimalist.

They, you know, lost the curviness that you would associate with the 1950s,

and we have gone to this rather squarer form

that you would eventually

come to associate with most of the 1970s.

That goes in there.

The most important thing to remember about Sir Kenneth Grange

was that he was called Ken.

You weren't really allowed to work for Ken Wood

unless you were also called Ken because that would have meant

renaming a lot of things - his house,

his boat, his haircut - the lot.

Put the handle on, like so, and, then, put that on top of there,

like that.

Fantastic. You would never guess,

looking at that rather simplistic minimalist shape,

just what is going on

inside that thing.

That motor, that gearbox,

all those hundreds of screws and little bits and pieces

and the release lever,

the epicyclic arrangement.

It's all fantastic, isn't it?

There it is, the Kenwood Chef.

Just arrange it artfully for you, there.

Now, for the penultimate visit to the table,

where I can finally get the mixing panel,

which is shaped like a K for Ken.

I'm guessing that goes into there and you lock it in position with

a little nip on that.

I've never done this. How does this go in?

Now, of the 235 pieces that we started with,

there is one left to put on.

Can you guess what it is?

Without it,

the machine is useless,

or extremely messy and dangerous...

at any rate. It's this -

the bowl, the mixing bowl.

What a wonderful thing.

We are going to make a cake.

My 1960s food mixer is nearly complete.

The last nine hours and 32 minutes

have been so enjoyable that I think, in future,

I may take apart and reassemble

all my kitchen appliances before I use them.

I'll see if this one works first, though.

Let's begin with the all-important cocoa powder.

All I have to do, remember, in the modern world,

is chuck it in the bowl.

Sugar and flour in equal amounts.

The butter and milk.

Two eggies.

Fantastic. There you are.

The motor, the speed controller, the gearbox,

the K paddle, the bowl,

the chassis.

Most importantly, the ingredients for a cake.

Does it work?

It has to work, otherwise...

..it's just going to be a mess.

To the memory of Kenneth Wood.

WHIRRING

Ye-e-e-es! Ha-ha.

Look at that, it really works.

Let's find a baking tray and warm up the oven.

Who's taken the oven apart?