Vintage:  You are using the cookware that your grandmother used, was used by your mother, and is now yours.  Other than a new handle, it still works great.

New: You lift a pot off the stove.  Part of the bottom of the pot sticks to the stove (melted).  Part of it falls off onto your linoleum floor and catches the floor on fire.

So it is easy to get excited about finding some truly mint condition Revere Ware cookware like this brand new vintage Revere drip coffee pot on Ebay.  The seller was nice enough to send us copies of the manual for this pot for our archives.

If you are a true Revere Ware fan, keep your eyes on the Ebay auctions as new/unused vintage Revere Ware cookware does appear from time to time.  If you are simply looking to replace an old vintage piece, there are plenty available on Ebay and the number of Ebay listings is growing every year.

The best place to find Revere Ware cookware on Ebay is our site revereware.org, which categorizes all Revere Ware listings on Ebay by type and size, so it is easier to find just what you are looking for.

Heat Campbell’s tomato soup in pan. Before washing, rub left over soup on the copper and let sit a few minutes. If one eats the soup every few weeks the copper looks better and better with almost no labor.

The biggest problem with these units is the lack of availability of over-pressure plugs in the lids.  These plugs are made with a hole through them filled with solder that will blow out at a certain pressure.  Once the over-pressure plug is blown, it is done and needs to be replaced with another.

One possibility is to convert the pressure cooker to use an over pressure plug that is still available.  Specifically, Revere Ware’s model 1574 and 1576 pressure cookers use a simple rubber plug that fits in a 12mm hole in the lid.  These plugs are identical to Presto part 09915.

In theory, converting the vintage pressure cooker to use the new style plug should be easy – just drill out the hole for the current over pressure plug with a 12mm metal drill bit.  The vintage 4-quart pressure cooker has an operating pressure up to 15 lbs and the 157x models work up to 17.5 lbs.

Below are some comparison pictures between the vintage 4-quart and the 1574.

If anyone is going to attempt this conversion, please send us pictures and let us know the outcome.

As with anything pressure cooker related, we advise that you use caution.

We managed to find one of these new-in-box with the manual, so have gathered a bit of information on them.

This style seems to have come in 3 and 6 quart varieties that differed only in height.  Please visit our information page on that pressure cooker for all the information we have on that model, including the manual.

Revere Ware (aka World Kitchen) sells very few lids anymore for their copper bottom style cookware.  Our latest check shows two lids, a 10″ and one listed as fitting 2 and 3 quart saucepans.  For owners of vintage cookware, specifying lids by capacity means little as the sizes varied over the years for a given capacity.

By far the best places to get replacement lids for your copper bottom cookware are your local thrift store, where you can often find a large selection of lids, or Ebay, if you want to find a very specific size.  As of this writing, Ebay lists about 100 lids at auction.

We’ve created a site, revereware.org that sorts all Revere Ware listings on Ebay sorted by type and size, and you can find all the lids here.

To find the right lid for your cookware, choose a size that is listed with measurements the same size or slightly smaller than the inside diameter of your cookware. Revere Ware lids are usually just slightly smaller than the cookware they fit. Ebay listers will show this as anywhere from 1/16″ to 1/4 inch smaller than your cookware diameter.

Very few Revere Ware pots in our experience have a diameter that is NOT a whole inch; exceptions we have found include a 6 1/4″ skillet (that takes a 6″ lid) and 5 1/2″ saucepans. However, based on auction listing we’ve seen, there do appear to be 6.5″ and 7.5″ sizes as well.

For example, lids listed measureing 5.25 (5 1/4), 5.3125 (5 5/16), 5.375 (5 3/8), 5.4375 (5 7/16), and 5.5 (5 1/2) inches are all probably the same size measured slightly differently by different sellers and should all fit a saucepot with a 5.5″ inside diameter.

When I first became interested in Revere Ware and started looking for replacement parts (which led me to start this business), a guy named Charlie Anjard ran The Shine Shop, a business that restored cookware to almost new.  Charlie was extremely helpful and always willing to answer the odd question.  He has unfortunately closed his business due to health reasons, but in the time Charlie ran his business, he was very active in tracking down the history of the Revere Ware company and the geneology of their products, and he compiled all his work in what he called the Revere Info Center. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most of what we know about the history or Revere Ware’s products is due to Charlie’s work.

Unfortunately Charlie’s original site is offline now, but we archived a copy which you can find here.  One of the most helpful pages is the photo guide to Revere products over the years.

Selling for a whopping $362, I can’t imagine why these parts were considered so valuable by several different bidders.  Certainly colored parts are rare, but is it really worth almost $400 to have colored Bakelite handles on some of your Revere Ware cookware?

There is another set listed as well.

(You can find all of our accumulated information for this model here.)

These pressure cookers use a weight similar in shape and size to a standard Revere Ware lid knob to regulate the pressure which was alternately called the “pressure control regulator” or the “pressure control knob.”  While I seem to recall that different weighted control knobs were available that were calibrated to different pressures, our manual for these pressure cookers indicates only a single weight that is calibrated for 17 1/2 lbs of pressure.

If you are unlucky enough to lose your pressure control knob, your pressure cooker is good as a doorstop, not much else, as replacements aren’t available anywhere we are aware of.  For the enterprising DIYer that might want to make or have a replacement made, here are the important dimensions of the part:

Weight: 6.1 oz

Material: Brass

The inside of the hole is a very specific shape, shown here thanks to Playdoh.

The diameter of the largest part of the weight is 1.75 in or 44 mm.

Please let us know (and send us pictures) if you’ve successfully made your own replacement.

(We had a small bug that kept us from recording numbers above 1,000, which is why the top of the graph is flat.)

Ebay seems to have made some recent changes that make it easier to find Revere Ware (and probably many other) items. First, when searching on “revere ware” Ebay now includes results from “revereware” (i.e. no space) as well.  This is helpful as items are often listed in as one or the other but not both.  Second, Ebay searches for keywords like “revere ware” now show up in Google results.

Pan handles were $0.60 for the handle, hardware set, and hanging hook.  The official government inflation statistics (consumer price index) since 1950 peg todays prices at 9.09 times prices in 1950, which mean a replacement handle in 1950 cost $5.45 in 2010 dollars.  We sell them for $9.99.  Given that Revere Ware was a huge company that produced millions of parts per year, it isn’t surprising that they could sell them for less than we do.

But for other parts, the disparity is considerably less:

Replacement gaskets for the vintage 4 quart pressure cookers were $0.75 in 1950, or $6.82 in 2010 dollars.  We sell them for $9.99.

Lid knobs were $0.25 in 1950 or $2.27 in 2010 dollars.  We sell them for $2.99.

Hardware sets were $0.35 in 1950 or $3.18 in 2010 dollars.  We sell them for $2.99.

Not a bad deal.

Over the years, as evidenced by the many differently constructed lid knobs we have come across, Revere Ware has used no threaded insert in the lid knobs (threads are part of the Bakelite) and threaded inserts of various types of metal, such as aluminum, brass, and possibly others.

The problem is that after years and years of use, the metal inserts often rust to the screw on the lid knob and the knob will either disintegrate when you try and take it off, will fall off leaving the insert behind, or when you try to unscrew it, the insert will stay attached to the screw. What is left looks like this:

The stub can also appear black as there might be Bakelite attached to it.

Some customers inherited a lid looking like this and others just assume that the knob is glued on to this stub and when they receive ours, with a threaded insert, think they’ve received the wrong kind of knob.

If you grab the insert with pliers and unscrew it, it will usually come right off, revealing the screw.

In some cases, perhaps one out of four, the rust bond will be too strong and the screw will break off.  If that happens, here are instructions for attaching your knob with a separate screw.

If you order a knob from us, you can add a comment with your order to include a separate screw if you need one; we don’t normally ship them with a screw.

Problem:  The first few years of the vintage Revere Ware pressure cooker had a gauge rather than a dial.  At the bottom of the gauge sits a gasket, which over decades of use and life, gets dry and brittle and stops working, allowing steam to escape, which provides a false reading on the gauge lower than it should.

Solution:  Making a new gasket from some high temperature silicone rubber.

This problem was brought to my attention by a customer who had the problem, and when I opened up my pressure gauge, sure enough, my gasket was beyond repair as well.

I was able to find some suitable material in the form of a silicone baking sheet, which sounded promising as it was specifically intended for high temperatures and was a food grade silicone.  While the original gasket measured about 3-4/100th of an inch, the silicone baking sheet came in at 6/100th of an inch, a difference I hoped wouldn’t matter.

The original gasket was pretty well attached to the metal, but I was easily able to scrape it off with 1/2 of a pair of wooden chopsticks, a soft material so as not to scratch the metal surface and create grooves that might break the seal.

To form the gasket, I pressed down on the silicone sheet with the top of the gauge, which left a nice mark and cut it out with scissors.  I used an apple corer to cut out a hole on the inside.  To create the holes, I sandwiched the gasket between the gauge and the bottom plate and marked them with a small screw driver, and then opened them up with a drill bit.

As you can see, it is crudely shaped, but a good enough fit to make a seal.

The drill bit left imperfectly small holes that were a bit hard to get the screws through, so to put on the gasket, I first laid it on the bottom plate and threaded the screws through, and then placed the top piece on and screwed them down.

While the gasket is slightly thicker than the original, the screws were easily long enough to hold tight.

A quick pressure test showed the gasket to hold without any problems.

Customer John took a slightly different approach, and went to a shop called Great Western Seal & Gasket (didn’t know places like this existed) and had them punch a suitable gasket out of appropriately sized silicone rubber and then bought a small punch from them to create the screw holes.  I’m sure his looks much prettier than mine, but they both work fine.

You can still place orders during that time, but shipment will be delayed.

We have documented a simple if imperfect adaptation of the vintage style handle we DO sell to the early production pans, but for those looking for a better solution, this project should be inspiration; it is clearly possible to modify the spline that the handle attaches to to fit the “newer” vintage style handles we DO sell.

Thanks to Jim for documenting this project and sending it to us.

Sauce Pan Handle Project

This project involved putting a “Large” sauce pan handle on a “broken” handle stub of an early model Revere Ware 7” sauce pan.

The Problem :

Before: This “early” model sauce pan had a broken handle bracket.

After: Welding  approx. 3” of  ¾” x.065” stainless steel strip to the handle .

This is the finished handle fix –

Note:  The original -early model- right tab was wider than ¾” and had to be ground away to match the ¾” wide stainless strip added to fit the ¾” wide handle niches.

Note:  The dimensional detail of the added piece was accomplished by creating a piece of  light cardboard that fit the handle recesses and then transferring that to a thing piece of sheet metal and from that, it was transferred to the stainless piece for the handle. .

Left Side Detail:

Left Side A. The Left Side tab was basically unchanged.  However, we did weld the left tab to the new handle material for the purpose of strengthening the entire handle system.

Left Side B.   Blue Tape indicates the area of bakelight removal in the handle halves.

Note:  The black marker over the original strengthening rib where the handle is attached to the pan.  This rib interfered with the handle and therefore required some relieving of the handle with a Dremel tool to get clearance and allow the seam of the handle halves to mate up without a crack between them. (  See Blue Tape – Above  )

Left Side C.

Also the left side handle had to be relieved ( notice the semi-circle of blue tape ) and some of the handle cut away where the Tab was welded to the new handle material.

( See Blue Tape – Above  )

Right Side A.

The right side tab of the handle required the Tab be ground away so it was only ¾” wide to match both the new handle extension width and the bakelite handle niche.  Also bakelite had to be removed at the front of the handle where the strengthening rib interfered with the handle fitting flush to the tab.

( See Blue Tape — Above )

Right Side A.

This piece of .040” thick  x  ¾” wide  thick sheet metal was cut to fit the handle and used as a pattern for the shearing of the stainless piece that was .065″.

The stainless piece was then welded to the handle and ground flush.  Then the hole for the hanging ring was drilled after the handles were mounted and fitting well. The result is below.   ( The black line being the weld joint area. )

The Finished Pan….

The project was not all that involved and went quite smoothly.   Sheet metal snips, Dremel tool,  bench grinder, files, dial calipers, vice  and drill were the home shop tools involved.  I did take the stainless strip to a metal shop for shearing and welding.

In the case of Revere Ware, today’s cookware is made with a much thinner layer of stainless steel and copper than the vintage cookware was.  The thinner copper layer is not nearly as good at spreading the heat as the thicker layer in the older cookware, resulting in more hot spots and burned food.  Here is an example of the difference:

(Image courtesy of Classic Kitchens and More and The Shine Shop)

In the case of Pyrex, today’s glassware is made of tempered soda lime, while the vintage glassware (and current European glassware) is made of borosilicate.  Borosilicate glassware handles temperature changes much better than soda lime glass does.

Exactly when the changeover occurred is still up for debate, but there is some evidence that it happened about when World Kitchen took over the Pyrex business.

1574 4-quart pressure cooker

1576 6-quart pressure cooker

These pressure cookers are characterized by the pressure regulator weight that is similar in shape and size to a Revere Ware lid knob.  You can find the 1574 gasket here and the 1576 gasket here.  These pressure cookers also have a helper handle that is the same as the single screw handle we sell replacements for.

That exactly why we started making parts and providing manuals and information, so that future generations can continue to use the great old cookware.