Flash, the stove whisperer. My thanksgiving story of appreciation.

It was challenging to be engaged in baking fish when Flash, my friend and cycling buddy, took charge of my kitchen last night.

I had the salmon baking in the oven.

I hope the smell of food filled the air appetizing my guests.

Also filling the air was a high-pitched grinding noise, which I had learned to hate.   “Flash”, aka Jim Gordon, had a very different interest other than dinner.  He was interested in that damn sound. To Flash the sound was an invitation to think. As for me, I wanted to ignore it and get the fish out to the dining table.

Jim likes to figure things out. I’d say now that he was listening to the sound and whispering to my stove in some skilled way that I could not see.

Whispering to stoves? They do it to horses don’t they?

On a bike ride or in your kitchen, he is your man when something unexpected happens.

I had facebooked (excuse me to all grammar teachers anywhere) about the increasingly bothersome noise coming from my gas stove. I first became alerted about this when my daughter texted (sorry again!) about it and nearly had me coming home from “the office” to check for safety. 

Later, when I entered the house, I was reminded that there was a stove problem. A loud noise greeted me and came come the kitchen.

But it wasn’t the stove’s timer-alarm I was hearing. I’m very familiar with that sound. The sound did, it seemed, emanate from about the same area of the stove though. The clock and the alarm are inches away and above the rear right burner and on the stove’s back panel.

I tried to turn off the alarm anyway. Why not, maybe the alarm had changed pitch?

This noise had been sounding from the stove for about 5 days by the time Flash entered the kitchen. It’s root cause remained unsolved. In n the meantime, I had figured out a way to stop the screeching when I wanted it to stop. Which was almost all the time.

My style of figuring out how to deal with this problem started with looking at the stove, walking away from it and coming back later to look at it again.

There was a way to stop the noise by lifting the hood. I started turning it off two or three times a day. This meant taking the metal grating off from above the gas burners. Of course you only do that after removing the cast iron frying pans to somewhere. Then one must remove the whistling water kettle too and also remove whatever other cooking stuff might be found there after the most recent cooking session.

I was getting used to this. It was becoming routine. Actually I was becoming dangerously familiar with the removal of the stove top with its four burner openings. I would lift and gently lift and then pull the stove top toward me. It was becoming part of cooking, I the broadest sense. I’d seen the messy insides of the burner section many times. It always looked like it should get a good cleaning down there below the burners. It never got to that cleaning apparently.

My facebooking (regrets!) prompted a response from a friend, Steve. Note that he is a “friend” in the usual fashion, not in regular facebookese.) ..... though, err, he is “friended” so he could see my facebooking (yikes!) and respond to it, as I was about to mention,)

Steve can tell you how things work about as well as anyone I have ever met. My helpful friend said problems like this didn’t need a service call from a stove repair person. He said things like these should be fixable. Steve told me to clean out the parts.

It probably was dirty he told me. So, dirty ‘ol me could be the cause of all this fuss, as usual! If I could break it, then I probably could fix it.

After five days I had finally sprung into action.

Out came the burners. They come out in a very nice way by the way. No tools necessary. I peeked through the little tubing that is a little pipeline to carry gas to the burners. They are anything but heavy.  They are a home style micro reminder that PG&E needs to be sure their gas gets to where it is supposed to go without leaking. In truth, with this clever system in my inspector hands, it looked a little too leaky to me. But, at least there were no rice grains or bacon grease glops blocking places where air or gas or whatever is meant to go.

As a matter of fact these two burner parts were cleaner than any other section of the stove from what I could see. I cleaned the parts anyway.

And what does this operator caused mess have to do with a noise coming from above the burners? I guessed that there is a system of things that are working together and one down-line problem could trip off some important up-line systematic thingy causing it to malfunction.  I got this cleaning fix stuff from Steve and even from Al of Reed Supply (1328 Fruitvale Ave., Oakland, Ca. 510-436-7171).

After Steve’s response on fb I called Reeds Appliance hoping to get some further advice. No, Reeds does not fix stoves. But the owner Al answered the phone (It was either he or co-owner Rick) when I called his store. I told him that I remembered his store from its old location. We bonded! At least Al was as generous with his perspective on my described situation as had been Steve. Al even told me where to buy parts. I started wondering about parts of the system. Soon, back at the stove, I noticed the wiring going to a plug midway between the burners and the clock/timer.

With the whining of the bothersome system problem hammering at me, I decided that this wiring must play a role. You could see that about 9 wires combined into a plug. The plug went into plastic connecting place of sorts. Otherwise there wasn’t much difference from a normal light plug.

So I pulled on it. I pinched the sides of the plug and I then I wiggled it. Finally, some 20 years after it was inserted into the wall of the stove framing it came loose and separated. And the noise stopped! Whew! What have I done?

This is a turning point. Now cooking could be done at home on our stove. Just like usual. Usual except that the burners had to be lit with a match. Clearly, the electric pilot trigger was now unplugged. Following right along now, after my “fix,” the oven light didn’t work anymore. I could live with that.

But also different was that the oven below the top burners would not light now without the auto-pilot thingy working. It was getting difficult now. I found myself laying on my stomach in the cobra position. I was holding a lit match that I had floating below the gas tubing in the broiler area. The lit match didn’t invite a flame. It didn’t even lead to an explosion! I still had hair on the back of my hand. No gas smell hinted to any source for potential flame-ups or 3rd degree burns.

Cold case. So, in order to use the oven the plug had to be reinserted, the stove top need to be placed back on so the frying pans and the kettle could be put back on the burner grates.

I sometimes worry that I could have just let that be, just “live with it.” Live with the moving stuff off the stove, removing its top and pulling that plug for days and weeks on end. That’s why I’m married.

So it’s Wednesday evening and I’m baking the salmon. I’m actually kind of “holding” the fish there, keeping the filets warm, until it’s time to eat. Flash asks what is happening here. He has been listening and whispering. Take it from me.

OK, this is a moment, a part of the best in life.

I won’t under appreciate this moment. And I’ll remember the other moments too.

Steve had given his best advice. Alan gave his best advise. Both were genuinely interested in sharing what they know. Each are part of a support group that I didn’t enroll in. Maybe each suspects that I NEED the support. But I know that each person is a generous person, who shares what they can without a claim to some part of me later.   

Flash has that going for him in spades. And I believe he gets something important out of it too. All the better, by far!

Flash was looking, listening, thinking. The noise combined with his skills in working on mechanical problems He has used these skills in his working life, in his home life and recreation. The noise led to a question? He wanted to check out what would make such a noise? And he had, we were soon to see, identified its source.

I removed the kettle, the frying pan and a pot that had red potatoes cooked and waiting in it. I lifted up the burner framing and then the stove top. I showed him the wires and demonstrated how the sound stopped when I unplugged the wires at the plug. The damn sound stopped. He mentioned the clock. To my thinking the clock was some sort of spring timer device. Flash looked at it. He wasn’t having any of this non-electric spring operated stuff from me. So the timer may be spring operated but the clock is an electric device!

Insert “Duh!” here.

“Do you have a screw driver? A Phillips?”

Yes. I found one in a minute, and that gave me the sense that things were moving ahead exponentially. I had grabbed the trapeze and it was swinging back to Flash.

“Let’s look behind the stove,” said Flash. He was in charge!

My turn. I grabbed the stove and tipped the top to an angle to expose the back panel for the screws to be unscrewed. At this moment the oven door dropped open and the fish began to fall to the floor. Fish, what fish? We had a whole other thing happening here.

Four screws were removed exposing the rear of the clock and a plug with 2 wires that Flash noted were going to do the job. He pulled the 2 wires and their plug from the clock.

The screws went back into the back panel and the 9 wire (minus 2) plug was reinserted. The system was complete and operated silently.

So thank you Flash, this doesn’t go unappreciated. Hope it was as good for you as it was for me.

I don’t say “Thanks before meals” much anymore, but I sure could.