The evolution of hand crank appliances

They say what goes around comes around and nothing could be more than true with hand crank appliances.

Whether it's a craving for nostalgia, a simpler time, the fear of health issues with magnetic fields, people wanting to reduce their carbon footprint and live less dependent on the grid, hand crank appliances are once again being used in modern day kitchens.

People out of necessity became inventors of all types of hand crank appliance to make food prep more easily accomplished.

The early hand crank mixer pictured used a main gear hooked to a hand crank to drive two rotating blenders.

This was a rather rough example of a hand crank mixer, but the same concept can be found in the more Modern day Bosh mixers.

Oddly enough the Bosh mixing bowl with the rotating beaters have been adapted to a hand crank base made by the Amish and sold as The Little Dutch Maid.

One of the misconceptions of hand crank appliances is that they are hard to operate and create fatigue. The problem is that with many things, importers copied many of the traditional A hand crank products to come up with cheaper models.

These cheaper models used poor quality gears that did not operate smoothly, and created a lot of difficulty to use.

Take for example the common hand held egg beater, the original Daisy beater used precision gears which cranked like a fine clock mechanism. As the cheaper copy cat beater emerged the gears were pressed out of metal parts and then assembled into weak housings. Within a very short period of time these were nothing but junk.

That junk is probably what most of the baby boom generation now remembers.

With the introduction of electricity to most rural communities in the 30s and 40s electric appliances became king of the kitchen.

Now as those appliances are becoming cheaply made and people are looking for ways to live less dependent off the grid for a number of reasons, hand crank appliances are again becoming popular.

One of the cultures who have struggled through this evolution is the Amish. Not believers in electricity they too became frustrated with the cheaply made imports and out of necessity again began to reproduce or adapt electric appliances back to hand crank functionality.

Aside of The Little Dutch Maid Mixer, the Amish make a reproduction egg beater from the same Daisy beater design, it’s called The Country Egg Beater.

The Amish make other hand crank products or conversions such as a Kitchen Aid mixer hand crank conversion.

With this quality comes a price that has to be measured as an investment in a lifetime of use. The Country Egg Beater will cost you just South of $70 compared to a cheap import for $14.

As more people seek the simpler hand crank appliances, these Amish products are available online at Cottage Craft Works .com