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Better way to polish Revere Ware copper bottoms

Reader Don has the following suggestion:

I found some stuff that I use in one of my hobbies that makes cleaning the copper bottoms of pans effortless and it lasts for a long time see it here.

I used it by accident when I was cleaning my minerals and when I moved the pan away to get more room i was almost blinded when I lifted it off the counter in my shop.
2 things if you try this 1) use lots of cold water to rinse, if you think it’s enough do it 5 times more! 2) after you do this barkeepers friend is all my wife ever uses to keep “her”pans clean

The claim that it will never tarnish again is an interesting one.  We’ve ordered some to see how well it works.

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Fix a warped skillet?

We’ve tried on several occasions to fix a warped skillet, with little success.  However, we recently came across an article that talked about heating and pounding out a warped pan.

The technique is to heat them up, put a 2×4 long enough to go from edge to edge of the pan on to the crowned side, and beat the heck out of it — all over it’s entire length, while revolving it so the entire pan surface gets its share of whacking.

If the pan is warped so the crown is on the outside, you have to rest the lip of the pan on a flat surface, so that the handle doesn’t touch the surface; a stair step is good.  If the pan is warped so the crown is inside, you have to cut the 2×4 to fit — as closely as you can but without making a big deal out of it.

Just keep reheating the pan and keep on whacking ’til you get bored.  The flattening will hold longer if you do both the inside and outside, but you can get most of the goodness if you only flattened the crowned side.

If anyone tries this, please let us know if it works.

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Fake web store?

Plenty of our parts are available on eBay, as we recently mentioned.  Most appear to be parts that were likely obtained through us, or through our store front on Amazon.com, and are simply being resold (at a higher price).  So we aren’t totally shocked that other people are selling our parts.

But we recently found a site that lists all our parts, at substantially higher prices

 

They list a lot of other kitchen related items as well.

Given that we don’t currently sell wholesale, and those are clearly our stock pictures, it seems unlikely that they are fulfilling from inventory. That leaves a couple of options.

Our first thought is that it is a completely fake store and they will just harvest your credit card number and keep your money.

Our second thought is that, it is just a storefront sitting on top of Amazon.com fulfillment.  If they simply order the parts through Amazon and have it directly shipped to the end-customer, they don’t have to carry inventory for any of  the items they are listing.  So far, we haven’t been brave enough to try purchasing something to see if it arrives in an Amazon box.  But if someone is willing to try, we’ve love to see what happens.

The store looks pretty fake, as do the reviews.  It all looks as if someone tried to make it look like a legitimate store, but didn’t quite succeed.

Their contact page lists a German address and an emails: [email protected].  When I go to the tsc-retail page, it is a fancy presentation with text overlay talking about bringing the world closer together through retail … and the video shorts are of Seattle.  Hmm.

In any event, just a word of caution: We are the only folks that make these Revere Ware replacement parts presently.  We sell them through this site, and on Amazon.com.  The items we’ve seen for sale on eBay appear to be legitimate second market items.  But I would stay away form any other outlets (and the prices are much higher anyways).

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Our parts on eBay

It amazes us how many of our new parts make it on to eBay for resale, complete with all of our stock pictures and our product description verbatim from our website.  Since we don’t sell wholesale to others, we assume these are just parts that people have purchased and decided they no longer needed.  This must mean we are in the mainstream now.

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The seasonal nature of Revere Ware parts sales

Here is a graph of our sales for every year since we started.

This cyclical pattern appears in almost every way we measure our business.

  • Sales on our website
  • Total site traffic
  • Sales on Amazon.com
  • Google Adwords impressions and clicks
  • Number of Revere Ware related items for sale on eBay.

In retail sales, this is exactly what one would call a seasonal sales cycle.  From peak (December-January) to trough (June-July) is about double the sales.

With respect to our little part of the retail world, I’ve often wondered why people are twice as interested in Revere Ware related items around the holidays then during the summer and fall.

I have no idea what percentage of our replacement parts are purchased as gifts, vs people buying them for themselves.

In any event, it is in interesting factoid around our business we thought we would share.

 

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What 20,000 orders means

We reached a milestone yesterday, order number 20,000.

Since we started selling Revere Ware replacement parts, our business has shifted more and more to Amazon.com.  While we still sell a fair amount through our own website, about 2/3 of our business now comes from selling our projects on Amazon.com.

In all, through both channels (and a brief stint selling on eBay), we’ve fulfilled about 40,000 orders since we started selling back in 2009.  This may not sound like a lot relative to the e-commerce success stories you can read about in the news almost any day.  But for us, we like to think about having made 40,000 people able to continue to use their often decades old cookware, and that makes us happy.  After all, we started this business because we were looking for Revere Ware replacement parts and couldn’t find them.

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