The time of morning where you drift into consciousness slowly and hover about 20% conscious- 80% still dreaming has always been a great source of incredibly brilliant utterly absurd ideas for me.
I was thinking about cast iron pans before I went to bed, and how much I would like to get one of the old style smooth-ass pans again rather than the new pebbly ones since my Mom commandeered my grandma’s pans when she figured out they were better on a visit.
They are expensive as hell on eBay, and the odds are low of stumbling across one cheap at a garage sale first anymore. Eureka says my brain, I can buy a cheap one and smooth it my self. But how. Random orbital sander is too slow. The angle grinder would probably be fast enough, but almost impossible to get it evenly smooth without gouges. Nope the way to do it would be to use a real mill. Any kind of milling stand would probably work, but a Computerized and micron accurate guided system is the right way to go for a perfectly smooth cooking surface.
So I achieved full consciousness with my brain gleefully letting me know it had found a solution to the cast iron frying pan issue with the simple answer of buying a $10,000+, half room sized CNC Machining center.
I used a belt sander to sand away the bumps on a new cast iron flat griddle. Might be more difficult to do this inside a round pan. Maybe a disk sander would do the trick?
You’re saying the surface of the pre-seasoned Lodge cast iron frying pans is not perfectly smooth? How bumpy, exactly? Hmmm… mine is pretty darned smooth.
The other thing is to frequent garage/estate sales, although others will be looking for such pans, too.
No need for fancy CNC stuff… Give me a Bridgeport mill and I’d have you set in a jiffy.
Two things keep me from realizing my dream of a mill and lathe setup in my basement. First, a proper Bridgeport weighs a few thousand pounds, and I can’t imagine how one would get that downstairs, even in pieces. Second, I have no idea what I would build. It seems that all of the old timers spend their days making small steam engines in their home shop, but as cool as that sounds I’m sure it would get old. (“Here honey, let me show you my latest steam engine, it’s even better than the last one!”)
I have a mill, and a flycutter. Live near Cleveland? Actually I can envision a surface grinder with the pan on a rotary table. I have all that also, but not big enough to swing a pan. A lathe would do it, but kind hard to mount it. I wouldn’t dismiss the orbital, just use silicon carbide paper, not wood working sandpaper.
Is smoothing the thing actually going to help? I thought the rough texture of the pan (although pretty much an accidental artifact of the casting process) was necessary for the seasoning layers to key into and adhere to. I would have thought seasoning on a smooth iron surface would be prone to flaking off.
I’m also not sure that ‘flat’ means or implies ‘nonstick’ when it comes to things like fried eggs.
I got one from the Cracker Barrel store…might be bumpy though!-Nope just checked. Flat as a pancake where you put the food but their logo is blazed on the bottom
I have a very old cast griddle pan. I dont use either of these things…I might some day. I bet I could use them on outdoor grills though!