![]() The mixer certainly was in good condition, with just the usual minor battle scars and flour residues from many years of baking. I am amazed at its condition considering its age, but my parents looked after their possessions. I also remember watching Mum mince up cooked meat as well to make Shephard’s Pie. My Mum loved to bake, and she whipped up many wonderful creations with it, and of course my sister and I enjoyed many happy times scraping out the mixing bowl. It has sentimental value for my sister and I. I am happy to pass it on to someone who is pleased to own it. I would imagine it was a wedding present. Heather sent me the following message about the mixer: It had belonged to Heather’s mother, who had owned it from new. One quite special aspect of the Chef A701 that I bought was that it had a known ownership history and sentimental value to the seller, Heather. Note: the A701 pictured here is my A701 after restoration, and the A701A is another mixer I bought and am yet to restore at the time of writing. This difference meas that beaters for the A701 are not compatible with the A701A. The main difference is the mechanism where the beaters attach to hub. If any reader knows of a Woking made A701A please leave a comment below. I’m not sure if any A701A models were made in Woking before the move, or if they were only produced in Havant. At the end of 1962 Kenwood moved production to a new larger factory in Havant, where the A701A remained in production until 1976. Models with the new mechanism were designated A701A, and were essentially identical to the A701 in all other design aspects including, initially, the grey and white colour scheme. In 1962 a change to the beater attachment mechanism was made. It came in only one colour scheme: a white painted body with grey plastic trim – the colour scheme of Grange’s original presentation model. The new A701 Chef was produced in the Kenwood factory in Woking and introduced in 1960. Kenneth Grange’s half model of his Chef design as presented to Ken Wood in 1958 ![]() Grange’s clean modernist design with its rectangular shapes and straight lines is now considered an icon of British industrial design. Ken Wood apparently appreciated the novelty of Kenneth Grange’s half model presentation and ultimately selected his design for the new Chef, designated model A701. The half model was placed against a mirror to get the effect of the complete machine. Grange had only a few days to complete the task and ended up submitting his new design in the form of half of a model, because, he says, he ran out of time. Through this scheme the young Kenneth Grange, along with some other designers, were set the task of submitting a new design for the Chef. ![]() At the time, the British Design Council had a scheme to match businesses with industrial designers. Ten years later in 1958 Ken Wood decided that the Chef needed to be updated to maintain its “buy appeal” with customers. The first Chef, the A700 with its beautifull art deco curves, was designed in 1948. This is not going to be a detailed “how to” restoration guide, as unlike the A700’s when I restored those, I feel there is already plenty of information out there about fixing A701/A701A model Chefs, including the invaluable service manual should you want to restore one yourself – a project I highly recommend. Eventually I found and bought a very nice A701, and in this post I’m going to discuss this machine, its features, and some things of interest that I learned, and problems I encountered during the process of restoring it. After this, a design modification to the beater attachment mechanism was made and it became the otherwise identical model A701A (more history below). I wanted to find and restore an original A701 model, which was only produced between 19. Production had probably shifted to the A701A at this time, but the advertising hadn’t been updated. It features a model A701 (identifiable in the “and peels” photo) and early versions of the blender, mincer and coffee grinder accessories. This advertisement for the Kenwood Chef is probably from 1963. ![]()
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