So here’s a fun little story that starts in an antique store. I’m browsing around with Gracie and I spot this vintage Oster milkshake mixer. Dang, it looks beautiful with its mid-century industrial aesthetic, something that modern design seems to have forgotten about. It caught my eye but I definitely wasn’t thinking about milkshakes.
The Lab Equipment Problem
I’m always keeping an eye out for random studio equipment, and one of the things I’ve longed for is a propeller mixer for mixing batches of glaze tests. They’re made for mixing highly viscous fluids, and ceramics folks have discovered they work well for glazes and clay. If you want a decent one, you’re looking at few hundred dollars (Tony Hansen has written a lot about these on digitalfire.com - that guy knows more about propeller mixers than anyone should reasonably need to know, but I’m glad for it!)
The vintage Oster was priced at $100. I thought about what it was intended to be used for - milkshakes - and my brain was telling me a glaze slurry was not too far off.
If it doesn’t work for my studio, I end up torturing my waistline with lots of milkshakes. But if it does work out, I’ll be using a piece of vintage industrial art to help me make my own.
Glory to Screws and Shafts
Retrofitting was pretty straight forward. The Oster had a threaded shaft with a shoulder screw holding a washer at the bottom, intended for (I believe) swapping out various aeration attachments. I found I could remove the washer and mount a propeller directly to the shaft with the screw.
Finding a ready-made propeller would have involved hours of deep-diving on the internet (we’ve all been there, doom-scrolling through pages of increasingly specific industrial components at 2 AM), but this is where having a 3D printer comes in handy. I subscribe to digitalfire.com‘s newsletter, where you’ll often see Tony Hansen talking about is 3D printing endevours. Turns out he actually sells CAD files for various things he makes on his website, propellers included. Three dollars later and I had my blueprint.
3D Printing Meets Mid-Century Engineering
I had to modify the file a bit (Tinkercad is super useful for quick tweaks) to accommodate a countersunk screw. I printed it in standard PLA filament which probably won’t last forever (but it’s held up to about 50x 100g batches so far)
The original mixer came with a banged-up metal cup, so I ordered some new stainless steel malt cups from Amazon.
Total investment at this point: $119
To the Lab!
What made all of this so satisfying was experiencing how equipment from this era was built to last in a way that modern equivalents simply aren’t. The motor is of substance, the single switch will always work, the housing doesn’t flex or rattle, and the paint is from the atomic era. Someone with a pencil and a notepad designed this expecting it to run for decades, and apparently they were right.
Moving on to a bit of a rant.
In today’s world we’ve somehow convinced ourselves it’s okay that everything needs to be made cheaply, sold at a premium, and replaced every few years. We live in an era of cheap-immediacy; a lot of the best tools and appliances were made before that philosophy took over. They’re sitting in antique stores and estate sales, often priced as junk or novelties rather than functional equipment.
There’s probably some piece of vintage equipment sitting in a second-hand store right now that could solve a problem you didn’t even know you had. And there’s something very satisfying to me about giving old tool a second life doing something it was never quite designed for.