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The bail handle pot

Bale handle pots are a favorite of mine.  The handle makes it very easy to transport a pot of boiling spaghetti water to the sink, for example.  I have always though they were rare, but there are over 40 of them for sale on eBay right now.

If you are a Revere Ware lover like I am, consider making one of these beauties part of your collection.  The only downside is that there are no replacement parts for the Bakelite part of the bail handle.  I have had it in my mind for a while to design a 3D printable model, but never seem to find the time.

The bail handle pots come in three sizes, 4, 6, and 8 quart.  I suspect the 6 quart is the most practical, but the 8 quart is pretty useful as well.

Of the eBay listings, I counted:

16 4 quart, average price $44
21 6 quart, average price $49
3 8 quart, average price $135

I suspect a few of the 6 quart models were actually 8 quart ones.  Here is a lovely Revere Ware add that shows all three sizes of the bail handle pot.

The bottom line is that it is a great time to add one of these to your collection, both from an availability and price perspective.

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The difficulty of tracking the number of Revere Ware items on eBay

Since 2009, I’ve been providing the revereware.org site, which categorizes all the Revere Ware listings on eBay to help more easily find Revere Ware items.  Along with that, we’ve been keeping track of the total number of listings for Revere Ware items.  But this process has been fraught over the years.  Every once in a while, eBay will change it’s website format / design and the code we’ve written to capture the total number of listings changes, and we fail to get a valid number; this has happened perhaps 3 or 4 times in the last decade.

The latest issue to crop up is that eBay seems to no longer report the actual number of listings that a search returns, and instead returns something like this:

As of a few days ago, it reported 14,000+ so it isn’t clear if there are that many fewer items or they just changed what they report.  Doing other searches shows similar, but different results.

You can see this in the chunkiness of our graph as of late.

Perhaps there is a technical decision eBay made that resulted in this change, but it sure makes our tracking of listing numbers more difficult.

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What is a brand new Revere Ware tea kettle really worth?

While I see exorbitant prices on new old stock items on eBay all the time, it is hard to tell whether or not people are actually willing to pay a really high amount for the privilege of experiencing new Revere Ware, especially because many of the items are from the 80’s and 90’s, when the quality of items was sub-standard, not exactly the glory days of Revere Ware.

So it is interesting to see an auction for a new in box tea kettle; an auction tells us what someone is actually willing to pay.

A clue to the age of the kettle can be found on the bottom of the box.

I take that as 1975.  While Revere Ware might have started making the tea kettles with a thinner copper layer on the bottom after 1968, like they did with their copper bottom cookware, I’ve never found much difference in the pre and post-1968 era kettles, so 1975 is as good as any year in my mind.

Given the rarity of new Revere Ware kettles these days, $114.5 seems like a reasonable price to me.  But that’s about 10 times what is originally sold for. 🙂

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