STUPID GOODWILL..... STUPID EBAY.

  Well, after last week's great luck with the box of vacuum tubes, I suppose I was due some  opposite karma at Goodwill Industries.

  It was going to be a wasted trip until I saw this lovely, tarnished old chrome kitchen mixer....my mind immediately pinged 'RAYGUNNNNNN!' so I grabbed it up.

 It would have made a classy 50's style raygun with some work. It was space-age looking, had some nice vents and knobs on it, a handle on the top that looked kind of like a fin.. it was the kind you could either mount on a stand or take off and use by hand. It even had a grimy old port window on it that literally said OFF or ON behind the glass of it when you turned the knob. The Mounting stand was missing but I didn't need it. Off of the stand, the mounting part was begging for a handle and trigger. The front part with the mixer mounts would have come off easily and could probably be cannibalized for parts. It wasn't clean or pretty. It had age and wear, and that's what was so great about it, and why I thought it would be cheap.

(pic found online of similar mixer- different handle, shown opposite side of 'off/on' window)

  So I carry it around for like 20 minutes while I look at stuff. I get to the register and say "This didn't have a price on it but it was back with the other appliances".  The girl looks befuddled. She didn't even know what it was. She asked an older cashier who said- "Oh that wasn't supposed to go out- they are going to put it on ebay".

Mind you it didn't have the beaters, the mounting base was missing and the cord was kinked and frayed- the whole thing may not have even worked!
  I should have pulled the 'customer is always right' routine, or how I shop there all the time and they would lose a customer...better still if I had only known I would have taken the price sticker off of something else (a decent price mind you, I'm not a crook) and stuck it on and the girl would never have questioned it.

so, I guess I will see if I can find the savannah goodwill's ebay account, or at least scour ebay for other broken, low priced mixers like that.

Holy Jeez it would have made a swell blaster.

UPDATE: screw that old mixer for now....old power drills are where it's at for a good base/parts for atomic and dieselpunk ray guns! And they are pretty cheap, and lots of retro styles. I just scored one like this for $10.

I'll take the mechanism and end cap off of it, and modify it to where it's unrecognizable. It's a pity we don't make things like this anymore. Everything is plastic and has branding all over it. this is a Black & Decker but you would never know. still works too. can we say the same of the drill you and I have now in 50+ years?