Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster--Repair and Modernization

let's fix some toasters hello and welcome to the technology connections to follow-up where we take a look at these three toasters examine what might go wrong with them and how to fix them and walk you through how to replace the power cord I have already replaced the power cord on this guy to a much more modern and safer grounded plug and have correctly hooked up the wiring on the inside so you don't have to worry about getting an electric shock from touching the insides of the toaster unless of course your outlet is wired backwards then sucks to be you this is the exact same toaster model right here and it has its original power cord so I will walk you through how to add one of these it's not very complicated but it's good to know both of these toasters are the Model T 35 they were made between like 1958 to 1969 or something like this this is a much newer version of the same toasters they moved the shade control to the front so it has a little slider but as you can probably tell already it's the exact same body basically there's one tiny difference which is kind of interesting but other than that the mechanism is exactly the same they just modernized the control and changed the handle design and this is the most I don't know this is the most modern version but it is among the more modern ones and this one doesn't work and I can already see why it doesn't work and it has to do with the tension of the control mechanism and that is where we will start we're going to put these two to the side and focus on this toaster because it will reveal what can go wrong with these and cause them to not work and the fix is shockingly easy in probably at least 90% of the cases of this toaster so let's get going alright before we get too excited into fixing this I just wanted to show you the one weird design difference that appears to have been made at some point and that is that the text1 slice was turned around let me take you off the tripod here so you can see it better so you can see on the toaster in front which is the older t35 one slice the one is at the back of the toaster so it goes back to front as far as how you would read that text and the newer version the one is at the front so they flipped that text around it looks to be the exact same stamping pattern and the exact same you know typeface and size they just for some reason and the words they flipped them around don't know why but they did that I almost wonder if that was just an accident when they were making these things because you can tell that the the shell is exactly the same not a lot was changed and how these were built so I wonder if at some point the dye got turned around or if that was intentional but in any way in any case that's not the main attraction of this video so let's get to the main attraction of this video all right so this is looking into the broken toaster and you should if you understand how these toasters operate being able to figure out why it doesn't work in this resting state you can see that the bread carriage is not at the top it's kind of hanging out in the middle if I unplugged so don't worry if I stick my fingers down in here no you won't be able to see anything I'll go down on this side you can see that it's not very there's not a lot of tension on here so I can lift it up higher but it falls back down that is a no-no and the toaster cannot function in this state because the only way the thermostat is going to trip to start the toaster is if it is all the way at the top the toaster will not begin unless the carrot is all the way up here because of how the switch is actuated you can actually see in this footage that I made for the main video the tension wasn't high enough so what happens is as the bread falls it actually moves the carriage down past the point where can actuate the switch and the switch doesn't get actuated so oftentimes if it seems like the toasters not functioning it's almost always just the tension so how do you fix that on the bottom is of course the crumb tray now this this this design late in later years they used to put a sticker here and I've seen it on an eBay listing if it's still there I will put it up and the sticker would tell you what you need to do there's a little set screw right in there that's what attaches the center core to the toaster so if you open this up it's that screw right there this is a little different on these newer models because this is how the darkness control this is connected to the lever on the front that's the linkage that connects it to the she will thermostat on the side but in any case this screw right here affects the tension of the actual mechanism because it's you know it's pulling on the center core or pushing on it at all time so in its resting state it needs to be quite taut and in the case of this toaster it isn't so let's get a screwdriver tah-dah so in this case you actually want to loosen the screw if I'm not mistaken there we go I'm gonna loosen it a bunch of turns because I know that this is just not at all in the right shape you'll turn it upside down and take a look at that now the carriage is at the top it's where it's supposed to be this is still not got much tension on it I can easily move it with my hands in a good toaster so this toaster back here which is working and again don't worry it's unplugged this is kind of tense in fact this is a good way to check it if you put your hand down and let it go it should snap back up pretty quick this is almost there in fact it might actually work and let's plug it in and try it out oh boy it hasn't run in a long time but it did it is in the trip position so you can tell that it's burning a lot of dust off of the heating elements now we just have to hope that it actually trips perfect so now you can really tell the tensions not quite right because it's taking a long time for the carriage to come back up but it is moving so that's an improvement and by the way that was the first time I've ever plugged in this toaster if it wasn't obvious one of the downsides which I did not bring up in the video about these toasters is these slots are actually also a tiny bit shorter than newer toasters so this wide potato bread loaf doesn't quite fit I had to cut it down a little bit but let's see if this will trip when I put it in hey we got somewhere it didn't really fall all the way down let me cancel this oh yeah that's that's a that's one thing to point out these newer these newer ones with the slider the left there is an off position so you can cancel the toasting operation yeah so it definitely we need more attention on that no matter what so let me unplug it again because you don't want to open that bottom while it's plugged in I'm gonna do one more full turn this screwdriver is almost too big for this screw an ancient Crum so let me check oh yeah that's nice and firm this is probably about where you want it to be set so this is working but it's not quite dropping all the way down to the bottom when you put in the bread and that may just be because it's kind of bound up from not being used and so long let me put another slice on the left-hand side there we go just had a bit of resistance in that spot so there you go that's pretty much all that ever goes wrong with these so what usually happens is the tension gets a little too low so then there isn't enough downward pressure on the levers which push up on the bread carriage and so that was obvious when I saw this toaster because the carriage was kind of half way down so again what you want is to have and this is plugged in so I'm being careful here is to have tension you want to have a nice snap back like that and that would be my my estimation of how to get these working the best because you need to have enough tension on it so where when one slice of bread is in there it's still all the way at the top so that way the action of hitting the trip lever will start the toaster so this one will probably improve as it gets used more there's probably just a little bit of gunk somewhere on the levers that are that's causing that resistance when it first falls down but it is actually working and I should set this somewhere to where it will actually kind of toast the bread and we'll see how it comes out starting to smoke a bit well that was set to about medium that's a little bit darker and I had to I had to interrupt it and that's a bit darker than I would like myself but I think part of that is because I had to tear the edge off the bread besides were definitely getting more burned than they should be this model I don't know how to adjust that thermostat slider position I don't think there is a way to and I'll kind of get into that when we take apart the other one which is what we're gonna do right now all right this is the toaster that we saw in the video put together the other one that I have already replaced the cord was the one that was taken apart so we're going to replace this very old tired cord with a newer appliance cord this is a three pronged power supply cord it is rated for it's a 16 gauge cord so I believe that's 1600 watts 16:25 and these toasters you use about 1350 watts as another thing I didn't touch on the video these toasters are wickedly powerful compared to newer toasters which you can probably tell by how intensely the elements glow but the cheaper toast the newer toasters are usually like 750 watts and that partly explains that number makes perfect sense because a four slot toaster which you can get these days two of those side by side would be 1500 watts and whereas that number appeared before anyway so this cord here I didn't show it to you in the video very closely this is its end this is like terrifying it's nice that it says sunbeam but the plug is so small and you know one of the criticisms of the American electrical system is that our plugs they're kind of unsafe well this is very unsafe because how close you are to the prongs when you're holding this and there's no it's just scary and I mean it's cracking it's aged it should go so we're gonna make it go to do that you need to remove the bottom of the toaster you don't need to take the toaster completely apart and if it's working correctly I would advise against doing that but there's a very important thing these particular toasters the t35 and the older versions that have this darkness control on the side the dark the bounds of the darkness control are set by the plastic the bakelite plastic here at the bottom is baked like plastic and correct whatever you want to say the bakelite here the the stops from lightest to darkest are part of the plastic shell so when you take this off this can just spin around and around and around and you will definitely get the thermostat completely misaligned so what you want to do is set this to one extreme either darker light remember which one you set it to and you need to remove this before you can take off the bottom anyway so what do I have this on I had this on darkest which is what I have done before so use a screwdriver to gently pry this off and again try to keep it in the whatever position you want it in because now that it's now that it's not touching this will spin in circles so be careful with that okay now this is off and to remove the bottom of the toaster you need to remove the crumb tray because basically the crumb tray and these two screws are holding it all together remember that the ones with the washers go on this side they are otherwise identical screws and I'm going to assume that this is exactly the same as the one that I just did however there is a difference between the two in that the coiled heating elements are constructed differently I suspect this is a newer version but if it is the same there's going to be a strain relief kind of built in under here which is good because we can use that so - now that this is unscrewed you can take the crumb tray completely aside and this should come right off I have to lift up a bit and get it around the thermostat yes okay this is quite a bit different okay there's some ancient crumbs down here we'll get rid of those the main difference is that these wires are actually labeled or actually colored they were both white and the other ones so they have blue red now that is interesting because that would almost imply that they meant to put in a polarized plug because why would they color code them in any other case I don't know but with this strain relief the way it's designed we can basically use that with our new cord and the way we're going to attach it is using the same crimp connections that they used here I don't have I don't have ones that are really perfect for this application but they work well enough other things keep mine the power cord has to go through this bakelite bottom and you may have to enlarge the hole that the cord goes through I had two in the other one I used a utility knife to scrape it away this one doesn't this one looks like the new cord will fit fine so just keep that in mind you might need to kind of scrape away a little bit to get it to fit inside there but you might not alright so these are the three connectors we're going to use we're going to use two butt connectors and we need to trim down the sides because these are a little too long and then one ring terminal and this will be for our earth or ground connection and we have a perfect place to put this thanks to the design of the toast and I will show you that in a moment so first things first we're gonna remove this cord from the strain relief the strain relief does not it basically just so when this goes in it's got a matching recess for it so it just clamps down the connections so that's gonna be the most fiddly bit and you will see I'm gonna get my power cord on package so we do need to take off a little bit extra of the sheathing here because we need to remove about this much I'd say from the other one and I have this tool which is used for taking off the well taken off the sheathing of household wiring you can do this however you would like but this tool is pretty nice for this as you can see it just carves a slice down there and it doesn't hurt the wires but then of course you have to get this off and there's really no super elegant way to do that okay that's about as nice as I think I can reasonably get it so first thing I will do is cut the excess off of these a little bit we don't need this much and I'm just using scissors for this because my my wire stripper and crimp tool has very dull cutting blades okay so now these are cut down to a more reasonable length and what we can do now already is crimp the Spade ring connection whatever you call this onto the ground so I will do that these crimpers are for 16 to 22 gauge wiring and of course my crimp tool 22 and 16 are two different or it goes 22 to 18 then 16 to 10 so I'm gonna use 22 to 18 because it's a tighter crimp squeeze that nice and hard there's our ground terminal where we're gonna put this is right ooh hahaha we have a problem this design is different oh the sides of the toaster are riveted to the central core in the older toaster and again this is confirming my belief that this one's a newer revision these had screws that we could remove so we are gonna have to improvise a little bit I wish I had noticed that a moment ago no matter there's two things that we could do we can either drill another hole into the side here or if the wire if it works well enough I will just make it to here what I did any other toaster was removed this well actually I'd remove all of them so I could move the clamshell out stick the ground lead between the two of them and just screw it back together this is gonna be a little bit different one thing that we could do but it's gonna be really hard to do to get it aligned when you put this back together you could put it here where the screw goes to put the bottom back on the toaster but it's it's rather difficult to do it that way oh boy okay well let's move forward then we will remove these old connections I'm going to try to basically UNCHR imp this to save as much of the original wire as I can because we don't have a lot of extra here oh man this is probably impossible these are much firmer crimps than the other one okay this is the only one that we have enough extra on the red wire but on the blue wire we really don't have a lot this is the this is annoying let's see what I can get to have happen yep okay well that just broke it off just repeat on this side then okay that will make things slightly more difficult but again since one of things gone easily so this is the most annoying thing about this process is that you have to feed your power cord through here the whole time you're doing this because there's no way there's no other way to do it so we will get our newer power cord which by the way I didn't mention this is only a three-foot lead you could dick you could get a longer lead but when I was buying these the only one thing that I did consider doing was there was a 20 foot extension cord like this that was white and I could cut that down to like six feet which is about what the original cord length is but I got to thinking you know it's gonna be better if it's black this is actually an appliance cord and the other thing is with it being three feet that's kind of like what toasters kind that's that seems more modern now if you buy a new toaster they have a rather short cord I'm not sure why exactly but probably something to do with safety so we'll we'll do that but we have to feed our cord through the hole and yeah we will not mean to enlarge the hole on this one at all and now I will put my butt connectors but these ones the way they're made they have to have the ends taken off because they're too long otherwise and actually I would prefer if I had non-insulated butt connectors because they're gonna be smaller I don't know how much heat the insulation on these can tolerate but I will suppose a fair amount it's it's a definitely it's for electrical work if this is horrendously unsafe please let me know in the comments but I mean what was there before it's definitely I'm basically replacing what was there before these just happened to be insulated and judging by the fact that this is a bakelite piece I don't really think heat is that important right here it is after all on the bottom of the toaster and he likes to go up so now I need to strip a bit off of here one of my one of the patrons that has early access to the video thought that maybe these this insulation might be asbestos I don't think it is it really seems like it's just a paper insulation what I should do is see if it burns because I don't think asbestos would burn that is two layered insulation act actually there is a rubber or some sort of second layer under here this is the same - it looks to be that this lead is aluminum and this lead is copper and I wonder if the reason why is because this lead is actually going directly to a heating element and this one is going to a switch I don't know I don't know I wonder if I've read in read far into the patent if that would be elucidated there but again I don't know so we're gonna put a strain relief about where it should go and get a butt connector and I don't want to I want to because there's so little extra extra room now very on there and again this goes to so this looks a little counterintuitive I should probably stop and explain this this lead is going to the switch it goes around so this is where the hot wire should go so if you are in the u.s. that's the black lead I think it's the same in Canada and I have no idea if these toasters were ever made in to go in Europe and there's pretty well actually that's a great question you could in theory because of how simple this toaster is if you got a high-powered diode you could convert these to 110 I have no idea if that is safe at all so probably I don't know if that's wise but what you could do is you if you have wave rectified its power supply it could be run on 240 and work pretty much exactly as it should in the US so if anyone wants to try that be my guest but I really don't know if you could get I mean I know diodes exist that can handle this much current but where you would put it I don't know if you could put it in a toaster or if you'd have to put it in like the power cord somewhere but the fact that this really is just one switch controlling the whole toaster you probably could convert this to work on 240 without too much difficulty okay our hot connection is now crimped on now we will do our Neutral you are kind of at a space premium for this whole operation which stinks a little bit ooh this is hard to do with your left hand okay so now the toaster should work and what we can do we could test it actually it since it's not taken apart it's gonna be really difficult to test it so let's just continue skip on over that so now we can put the strain relief back and hope that there was enough excess wiring for this to kind of go where it's supposed to it's gonna be tight but it should work aha no I thought you would be the better one okay hang on okay that crimp failed so we're doing this again I'm gonna try to double crimp it it's just I have so little excess room here that I'm worried about and I did read up I did double crimp it on the other one I don't know how that will change things well that's not really on there much hopefully that holds better one of the one of the things that just sucks about the design of the this strain relief is just how you know kind of difficult this is now in theory I don't have to use the same strain relief I could do so use a completely different solution for this but the thing is if I were to do something else I need to get some sort of terminal block so it's you know insulated from the body of the toaster and the strain relief that it has honestly would work pretty good but they gave you like no extra space at all and to be fair this is not the best tool these are not the best crimp our butt connectors butt connectors okay so again we will put these back where they go try and keep the ground lead out of the way okay and see the point of this the reason why it's sneaking like this is so that way when this cord is pulled it doesn't actually this 90-degree Bend means that it's pulling it's not pulling on the actual pleats that's why they call it a strain relief and so if you wanted to you could get rid of this but the other challenge is that the the bottom of this is molded to accommodate it and so if you do you might need to get a angle grinder or dremel tool or snap angle grinders a little overkill but a dremel tool and cut this out and do some sort of other because I mean what you could do is actually use the insulated butt connectors like I had used them where they are actually the insulation is sticking out on the sides and tap them to the bottom of this the only big consideration with this is it's a toaster and it gets hot so whatever you do it needs to be pretty resilient to heat but now this is essentially the the wiring is now modernized except we haven't put our ground lead anywhere useful yet and so where I would like to put it and this is where it gets a little challenging oh I forgot my hang on so what I'm gonna do is undo this screw and stick that in the middle and put the screw back now that's a very solid earth connection and also just the other reason why this is a great place to put it is because it's sandwiched between the actual inner core and the outer shell it's connected to both of them even though because of all those screws it would be wherever you put it but I just like how this works out but the challenge here is sneaking this somewhere this is probably the best Avenue and seeing how pulled out ah crap it pulled this out we're gonna leave the ground wire where it is okay after much after many attempts here let's hope we did this well enough okay this is now to the point where it should be able to be reassembled the ground lead is snaking right here there's actually a little bit of a gap in the sheet metal which almost makes me wonder if they had planned for a ground lead to go at some point and these connections are as good as I can reasonably get them using but crimps like I have used the the the real bummer about this is again just how short these wires are it would be nice to be able to extend them this design of the strain relief I think is actually pretty decent the only real challenge is the wires like to pop out and we're gonna have to manipulate this end of it a bit to get the back of it on this is gonna go better than the last time because the hole for the cord in here is much larger so it'll actually move more smoothly but now the challenge is we got to get it back on there and see they've already popped out this is the most frustrating step it's putting this back on so be prepared for this nonsense you kind of have the ability to use this as like a love like a shelf here let me take a picture with my phone so you can see what this looks like better but the problem is this end needs to go on first to get around the darkness control so you kind of have to just hope for the best yes it's really all you're doing and you do like when once you get the therm here I'll show you I should just stop talking and get to that point now that this end is on you can lift this up a bit it's hard to get a good angle to see and like you're not going to be able to see it all but you can lift it up and make sure that everything's kind of in place and lucky enough it is the ground is going where we want it to go everything appears to be where it should be the only day only you know the only thing right now is just there's there's a little bit tension I want to make sure that it's not yeah hang on oh the wires are completely out of the string relief like I said this is this is not really easy it's rather fidgety and frustrating and you just got to be patient and keep trying and the problem is because every time you you have to lift this up to get the thermostat put in and because you have to do that it's going to pull the wires out of a strain relief so I guess the best thing to do is to try to keep your fingers where I have them get the thermostat over still not consonant that that went smoothly okay this is actually probably the best way to do this that took a while but it's now in place I lifting it on the side like that I could see how things look now you can put it back together you can start with these two screws and this is actually an excellent place to start because you can make sure that it's going together correctly and this is gonna really squeeze down on all the wires in there and definitely keep it from moving around at this point if you'd like you can test this just leave the crumb tray off and now let me show you in fact let's test it now because we've put a ground lead on it the advantage is that if there is a short anywhere in here that would cause the wires to touch the metal chassis it should instantly trip your circuit breaker because it's gonna be a dead short to ground that's the whole reason we added a ground is so that way the metal body is always connected to ground to earth as you might say in other countries and then if there is some sort of electrical fault it should either trip your GFCI outlet if it's plugged into one of those your RCD if you have one of those in your panel or just the good old fashioned circuit breaker because hopefully enough currents will go right through to electromagnetically trip your breaker then let's plug it in and hope we don't die so far so good I think we've done it it's safe to touch the sides now and everything looks hunky-dory and now because the plug is wired correctly we don't have to worry about the internal elements being live unless your outlet is wired backwards and hopefully you've either tested them to figure that out or you know you just know that they aren't but let's trip it again on the screwdriver and now I would consider this toaster much safer to use I don't think the with a non polarized plug it's really that terribly dangerous but without a ground I'd be a little uneasy using this day today just because there's a lot of places as I showed in the original video where wiring is going right next to the body of the toaster and you know just with modern safety standards you don't need a ground on many appliances because they're double insulated meaning any anywhere that there is insulation there's another layer of insulation so you have a fallback this is single insulated and very old and entirely metal so definitely want a ground connection there so let me unplug it but the only real downside to the way that strain relief works is you have so little room like basically it's right inside here so where I had to cut the insulation you can see the why the interior wire a little bit so this is frankly there's no way to use a cord like this unless you're extremely careful where you won't be able to see the cut that you made on the outer sheath so if that's concerning to you what I would do is I would completely redo the wiring in here I would just take out the strain relief as it currently exists and do a sort you know do use those butt connectors as they are insulated tie them down to the bottom of the toaster frame and look for look for some butt connectors or whatever that have a high temperature tolerance and that's definitely an option if you don't want to use the strain relief in here as it exists not all of these toasters are going to have that strain relief some of them have completely different they have like a terminal block on the older designs I've seen and those may or may not be better or worse for you know for your application but definitely I trust this toaster much more now that it has ground on it and I'm not so afraid to you know I wouldn't be afraid to use this as an everyday toaster and that's really all you need to do it's just you know you need to have some patience because as you saw the butt connectors they can fail if you and really I just wish I had a better tool because I'm sure if I had a newer tool than this ancient thing it would work a little better and the other thing is I would be comfortable actually soldering new connections on to there rather than using a crimp connector that might have been a better way to do it but it's just because you have a solid core wire inside the toaster and a stranded core wire in the power cord I don't I'm more comfortable using a crimp connector in that situation maybe I'm totally wrong maybe it would be better to solder in either way but this is this at least tells you how to do it do it to your own standards and then the other thing to consider is that with the toaster repaired like this you know you may still not want to leave this plugged in all the time I personally am pretty okay with that because I know I know with the circuit design with it open like this and now that it's polarized there's only there's when it's plugged in there's only going to be power going right there and the rest of its gonna be the rest of its gonna be dead and the worst situation that would occur is if there is a short to ground somewhere well now that it's grounded you know you don't have to worry about the toaster really hurting you and also definitely if it's plugged into a GFCI outlet which all kitchens in the United States should have those in their kitchens now if you don't consider upgrading them it's not hard to do then basically the risks involved in using this toaster are mainly down to how hot it gets when it's in operation electrically it's pretty safe now in my opinion you may not think so and you know what that's totally within your tolerance so you know I'm not gonna I'm not gonna sit here and say this toaster is definitely safe to use you know let's be frank it's an old design it's got one single switch it does is not a double pull switch and we've made it much safer but I am pretty confident that the 8.88 sent Walmart toaster is safer than this one even though it's not grounded because the whole thing is plastic it's got double insulation everywhere and it trips both the hot and neutral side so pretty much all the risks that you have with this toaster are eliminated with even the cheapest newer toasters but we've eliminated the most dangerous risks and quite frankly I think that now in my opinion this is safe to use as an everyday toaster last thing we really need to do to put it together are put the darkness control knob back on and remember we had it set all the way to darkest so we're gonna put it back on just like that and push it in all the way and now it's in those bounds and we haven't messed up the actual settings and then it's just a matter of putting those these four screws back and it's completely back together alright and the last thing I wanted to do was I've taken apart V this is the new toaster and the reason why I wanted to do this is I could see that's not the new this is the newer version of the toaster I could see there are two wires going to this side I believe these might be protected against miswired outlet I think they might actually have to switch contacts now on the thermostat so I want to check it out but already I've discovered something there is a way to adjust these thermostats I didn't notice there's another there is a small hole in the bottom plastic housing exactly where the thermostat control used to be so this slider is just actuated this little bit here and the let's see one of these positions is off I know exactly how that how that works but you can there is a set screw here that you can turn to adjust the thermostat if the light is setting is like really dark you could back that off so it is adjustable interestingly the strain relief is exactly the same so they back they stuck to that design really the only difference is the bottom is now made of a true plaster you can't see it the bottom is not made of a true plastic it's not bakelite anymore but I want to get this side off so I can see what the thermostat what the switching situation is because I have a hunch that it is actually double pole switched and if that's the case then these ones aren't quite as scary I wouldn't worry about you know the plug not being polarized oh and also I was gonna say these are kind of a pain in the butt to take apart because the entire where did this screw oh okay nevermind I freaked myself out a little bit the the entire thing is held together basically by tension and these new ones are probably not as bad because the sides are riveted on but they're not the taking them apart is very easy but putting them back together not so much yep it's got to switch poles let me see let me move you so you can see it I really have to boost the ISO so apologies there but you can see hopefully there is they are right there there is a pair of swell two pairs of switch contacts so both the neutral side and the hot side are switched so these newer designs the fact that they don't have a polarized plug is not as bad because they do have they do have double pole switching so honestly with these newer ones I wouldn't worry about adding a ground well I don't know the ground wire these have newer you know cloth type wires I'm more and their insulation than whatever is in the other one I'm pretty confident that's just paper some people it was suspected it might be asbestos I think I already said that but anyway so these these newer designs that have the slider what well actually I would I shouldn't say that because maybe the oldest slider ones do have a design but you can look through the crumb tray and if you see two wires going from this side then that's probably a good sign that it's got a double pull switch on the thermostat side because this this is the hot wire going to the thermostat and then this is the neutral wire going to the thermostat and then back to inside the toaster and that's what I suspected this was and now that I've taken it apart I am completely sure so that's one thing to consider the newer designs are electrically safer you don't have to worry about the plug not being polarized because there is a double pull switch so really the only way to improve this would be to add a ground and that's up to you whether or not you want to do that but it has the same strain relief which is both like I don't know it's good because it means you can follow up pretty much the instructions that I just did but I don't particularly like how difficult this is to deal with so that's it now you know how to get one of these toasters working if for some reason that won't I would say you know it's not like that's the adjustment of the tension screw is the only thing that can go wrong but it it honestly seems like that's what it is 90% at a time other things like I said I would definitely use a grounded plug on the older ones the t35 so basically I should have gone over this if the thermostat is on the end like this and it has the gold sunbeam logo on the front or it has an art-deco pattern that's the first version that's the t20 then these ones definitely have a single pull switch and you should ground it and definitely or I should say I would prefer that you ground it you should definitely add a polarized plug the newer ones with the slider I don't know if they all have a double pull switch the first one that moved to a slider I think it was called Sunbeam Vista so you should take a look at that but look in the crumb tray if you see two wires going I should say three wires total spanning that distance then you know it's probably got a double pole switch because there's no reason for the neutral to go to the thermostat side and back unless it has a double pole switch but yeah that's about it so replacing the cord it's it's finicky it's not very involved but it's kind of finicky what I might have done and what you could totally do if you want to go and make these even more safer is you can replace the internal wiring you can get some modern high high heat wiring like what's in this toaster you could get some of that and redo the wiring inside the toaster that's getting pretty involved and honestly because it doesn't move and unless your change unless you're fiddling with the wiring I bet doesn't really bother me but it would definitely make rewiring it easier yeah and yeah that would it would be easier to rewire it because you have so little extra wiring in here that unless you can get the original butt connector off which I was able to on this one this was the first one I did I was able to wiggle those butt connectors off wiggle those butt connectors oh my god but anyway if you can get those butt connectors off it's not as bad because you have the room but if you have to cut them like we did for this one then you have almost no extra wiring in there so that's a bummer but yeah if you can get your hands on one of these toasters I think they're pretty neat the newer versions so basically I would say if you're concerned about safety and using these toasters I would get one of the newer ones that has a slider because that double pulse which means it doesn't really need to be a polarized plug and also part of why I was curious about that was the website automatic beyond belief made it seem like they say they never had a polarized plug and so I thought well there something must have changed because this original design in 1997 or even probably even to the 70s wouldn't pass ul certification I think with a single pole switch so definitely that did get fixed so the fact that it doesn't have a polarized plug isn't necessarily terrible it is on these older ones the t 35 and older make it a polarized plug at the very least I would suggest making it a grounded plug but the newer designs they're they're pretty ok anyway thanks for watching

Channel: Technology Connextras

Views: 386,033

Rating: 4.9494138 out of 5

Keywords: toaster, technology connections, sunbeam, radiant control, TC2, repair

Id: 2vcdbtAca0Y

Length: 48min 22sec (2902 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019