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“Yeah, I got an ‘87 Frigidaire off eBay...put a three-way bulb in it, it’s got adjustable vents on the veggie drawers, I modded the temperature controls, slapped an alloy plate on back, replaced the power cord, installed an ice-maker...it’s a solid machine. Not quite as cool as my ‘92, but it will chill a half-gallon of milk quicker than I could in the older Westinghouse. In fact, I’ve got a guy who wants to buy my Westinghouse, do some mods to it. I might take him up on it if I can get his Sanyo mini fridge in trade, plus cash. That’s a 3.6 cubic footer, and a lot of people don’t know that you can add an extension and re-route the air pretty easily, replace the motor, add industrial casters if you want. Pretty cool. “Friend of mine just sold his old GE for a stock Kenmore Elite; he showed it the other night and I was impressed. I might get one as my general tooling-around fridge, although I’d probably add a digital temperature display and some stronger glass shelves. I don’t like their egg holders either, I tend to mold my own. But that’s only after I finish my Whirlpool project; I want to jack it up and add a KitchenAid bottom freezer. I might synchronize them and run it all down to 1200 volts, or I could power it with an Amana motor and two homemade compressors, but I’m still working on the housing. I know a guy who added a bottom freezer to a 1989 GE, but he put a glass faceplate on the bottom of the fridge. He tried to get cute with some cantaloupes and the whole thing broke. By the way, the GE wiring is like gold, if you can find anything from ‘89 to ‘93, buy it, rip off the back and save everything. If you wanted to use the GE schematic to overcrank, say, a Kenmore standard, you could do it. I’d recommend using the fans from a morgue fridge, and you might have to bore out the rear panel to get them in, and then you’ll want to upgrade your compressor, too. Bear in mind if you run it at full tilt, the top will frost like a son of a bitch unless you wind it down to almost 2. “My real pet is the 1965 GE that I found at an estate sale a couple years ago for a hundred bucks. You can’t get those at that price unless they’re rusted and cracked to hell, and even then you’d end up rewiring it and it would still suck freon all day. But I got lucky with mine. So far I’ve done the drawer re-fit, rewired a three-way bulb and switch, rehabbed the condenser, and added a silent defroster. I had to redo the power, too, because the original cord was ready to kill somebody. Apart from some scrubbing, it’s beautiful as is, and the door rubber still gives you that sweet ‘frutz’ and ‘whump’ when you open and close it. Sweet machine, or it will be when I’m done tricking it out.
“So I’ve got the old GE, three Frigidaires, including the ’87 I just got off eBay, two Whirlpools in progress, a KitchenAid standup and two bottom freezers, a few stock GEs from about fifteen years ago, two and a half Kenmores, my deluxe Amana, five minis, two chest freezers, the Westinghouse I might sell, and a walk-in cooler. Plus all the spare parts...well, you’ve seen my garage. It’s ridiculous.”
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