In his Reference Gallery post igh371 said of his example of this stove, I believe that's a misconception, probably fostered by the chopped-down pan ring sported on the 1948 Valor 51, also with pressed steel legs featured in this Reference Gallery post by the stovie formerly known as Iani Quirky modification by an owner in that example, but clearly a regular Valor pan ring is intended for this stove and fits perfectly well without any modification necessary The question is why Valor briefly (only seems to be on 1948 models produced in May and June of that year) fitted pressed steel legs instead of the usual steel rod stock. Igh371 used the word 'utility' to describe them. Certainly they have the look, and doing the maths there's marginally less steel than in a round-sectioned rod. Probably cheaper to fabricate too - taking one stamping operation - whereas I'd have thought the convention of forming a foot on each round-sectioned leg was done separately from the job of putting the bends in the rods. Having said that, new tooling would be required, which would take a lot of sets of legs to recoup costs and it doesn't explain why it didn't last as a Valor feature. Apart from the non-original fuel filler cap (from a Radius) ... ... the stove is pretty much complete, with Valor burner and caps ... ... a fuel tank in decent condition (date stamped on the base) with just one small dent beneath the 'a' of Valor Unused Valor jet prickers Windshield The one on the left is for this stove, the one on the right's from a mint Valor Packaway Though different in height, they share the same part number, 4572 It just remained to fuel up and fire up John
Thanks for the post John This is a very nice and unique stove. wonder if it was its popularity amongst purchases at the time which caused Valor to produce it for such a brief period?
I got one of those Stoves with the pressed steel legs John, gonna have to dig it out now and have a nosey Nowhere near as nice as that one though
The key to this conundrum is the year, 1948. In 1947/8 in Britain it was not a case of trying to save a bit of money on steel costs, the simple fact was that if your firm got on the wrong end of government steel rationing allocations you simply did not have the quantity of steel that you would have wanted, full stop. The Rover Car Company, for example, wanted steel for 15,000 cars per year, and were given steel for 1,100; hence to a large degree why they put so much effort into the new aluminium paneled 'Land Rover' as a supposedly temporary expedient. No-one knew how long the restrictions would last so retooling in order to stay in production sometimes was a price that had to be paid; as exemplified by the Rover case. This all also explains why some pan rests could be made in revised presses without the outer ring. These are pressed in this form, not cut about; look carefully at the way the curtailed ends are formed. Why didn't they last as a Valor feature? My personal opinion is that it would have become all too clear all too quickly that these types of legs were not a satisfactory replacement for traditional legs, they are far too easily twisted and bent.
Iani wasn't one for offering explanations so the factory-docked-or-not pan ring is down to the evidence of that photo alone. What's left of the pan ring is either scorched or heatproof black painted, which hides many sins. Question is why someone would bother, but it's not the first chopped pan ring to have cropped up on CCS as a 'special edition' Curiously, apart from mine there's another clean example of this stove on ebay at the moment, also with the 'whole' Valor pan ring. Without any Reference Library or other authoritative sources of evidence that a 'special' truncated pan ring was part of the kit, I'm unconvinced.
I would have to agree that the full pan ring makes sense rather than the truncated one. Even though the truncated ring would still work the full pan ring is more in line with production, where a truncated pan ring is one more step in the process of production, and maybe even a costly one, unless less metal was used to produce. Also, a full pan ring would be something everyone, at the time, would be used to seeing and thus, maybe a little more marketable. sam
@presscall To update this, if it's not mentioned elsewhere on the site, I have just taken receipt of a pressed steel legged Valor 55 which has a date stamp of "4-48", so April 1948. It also has a full sized pan ring. So we can safely say these pressed steel legged versions were produced at least from April to June 1948. Sorry for the blurry photo, I only have my phone and it doesn't go too close! But you can see it says 4-48
