Planetary Problems: Fixing my KitchenAid Pro Stand Mixer

Here's a post that has nothing to do with Thumper or babies (until the end), because it's about something that happened long before I was ever pregnant, that got lost in the shuffle when we moved to the city: the saga of our broken KitchenAid mixer.

The Yeti has always been far more into cooking than I am, and when we got our first place together after college, a big "adult" purchase was a KitchenAid Pro stand mixer (in Nickel Pearl, ooh).  Probably the Yeti's favorite thing to make with it was pizza dough (mine was cinnamon rolls), and many a calzone or personal pizza was had for a few years.

Then one day, it was in the middle of mixing something when we heard a clunk and a grinding noise and the thing stopped spinning, though the motor was still running and grinding.  It also looked like the beater had dropped about a half an inch lower into the bowl, and later examination showed that the entire "planetary," which I think of as the "ceiling" to the beater, was hanging loose.  After the swearing died down, we poked and prodded it with our limited knowledge and came to the conclusion that we had no idea how to fix it, or if it was fixable.

How it's supposed to look, all tucked up into the body (featuring the hand of The Yeti)

But no, you can see daylight here

I looked at Amazon reviews and my heart sank.  Many people had complaints about this part or that part breaking after a few years, stuff made out of plastic instead of metal, and so on.  Many of these complaints had been fixed since the negative reviews, but only in recent years, and ours was bought before then. You could send your mixer off to be fixed but it supposedly cost $150 at least, not counting shipping for the beast.  And that was still much cheaper than buying a new one.

However, the mixer was not a necessity and since we didn't decisively know what to do, we didn't do anything.  It sat there, silent, for weeks and then months and then... two years.

At that point, I got sick of it taking up space and decided to figure out whether I could fix it.  I'd been on a DIY kick and was convinced I could find a YouTube video that would teach me how to do anything.  Unfortunately, while I could find many DIY videos and blog posts about the stand mixer, no one seemed to have our specific problem, so I couldn't just follow steps exactly.

A few YouTube videos were incredibly helpful along the way, though.  One is here.  Though the description is very similar to my issue, it wasn't exact (the other video has since been made private, but it was mostly the same thing from additional angles).  However, it provided two important pieces of information.

First, it showed me how to crack open the mixer and get a feel for what's going on inside.  I was never a tinker-in-the-garage or build-your-own-computer sort of person, so it's not in my nature to attempt to take everything apart on my own.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that had I attempted to do so before watching these videos, I would have opened it up, seen that it's a massive, messy ball of grease and Noped out of there.  But this video showed me what stuff should look like, what something damaged looks like, and just generally made it seem more accessible.

The other vital piece of information is a recommendation for the site mendingshed.com.   They sell individual parts and pieces, and also provide copies of manuals.  We would wind up needing both.

So I set out to see what was going on.  I cracked open the mixer and cleaned up as much of the grease as I could, and examined the gears.  Some of them were indeed scored and gouged, likely from when the planetary slipped and everything ground together.  I set them aside to be replaced, but they weren't my main problem.

Between the Yeti and myself, we determined that the main problem was actually under all the gears and stuff, but above the planetary.  There's a piece of metal that's supposed to be pressed into the underside of the lower gearbox, that would no longer stay.  As such, the planetary dropped, and the little "tower" of gears on top (you can see them in the first picture) dropped down, causing the gouging on the gears.

The problem was there was no way to fix the metal piece.  It was not sold as a separate piece, because it comes as part of the lower gearbox.  Since it's just supposed to be pressed into place, there was no snapping or gluing we could do.

Luckily, Mending Shed actually sold the entire lower gearbox piece as a replacement.  I wound up buying a few replacement gears, a replacement lower gearbox, a replacement planetary (might as well, couldn't tell if it had been damaged), a little pair of pliers for a snap ring, and a big tub o' grease, all for around eighty bucks.

Now, here's where I jump to the future.  I checked out the site today and they now have the option of a much smaller container of grease, more suited for the task at hand, for much cheaper.  Also, for those replacement pieces, now they actually have a pretty wide selection of colors to choose from.  At the time, not so much. Still, I was more worried about functionality than looks, so to replace my Nickel Pearl parts, I got a white lower gearbox and a dark pewter planetary.

Upon receiving the parts, we got an amusing surprise - the piece that had caused us all this trouble had been changed.  Instead of a separate metal piece that provided the extra height (a piece that could fall out), the new gearbox had it simply part of the actual box:

In the old gearbox, that metal washer is sitting flush on the ground

In the new gearbox, it's sitting nicely on some molded plastic

Now all that was left to do was screw in all the bits the way we found them, including the new gears and pieces... 

Cover all the prettiness with a giant mass of grease and screw the cover on...

And voila!  A fully functioning stand mixer, now with white racing stripe.  

Good as new

I wanted to write about it because I still haven't really seen anything online with a similar planetary problem - usually they just want to replace the worm gear (which we did, but it wasn't the real issue).  We fixed the mixer about three years ago and it's still going strong as ever, for about 80 bucks altogether.  When it first broke, fixing it seemed like a daunting process, but it really wasn't that bad, thanks to the miracle of the internet!  And yes, I still rather believe that I can learn anything with YouTube.

Okay, a bit of a baby update in the present day: St. Patrick's Day happened.  One side of my family has Irish roots (when I was younger, I felt "extra Irish" because I have green eyes), and I grew up eating the typical corn beef and cabbage meal (which is not an Irish meal, but an Irish-American immigrant thing, like much of the holiday) and decorating the house and so on.  I don't really have the focus to go all out anymore, but I do make an effort to wear green and I'll probably do more in the future with Thumper (because we all know I love a holiday and ignore the dubious origins).  

Last year: 

This year: 

Okay, he's not wearing his official shirt there, but the parallels in the face make me laugh.  I had to cover up the official shirt with a hoodie, but he's ready to take on sunnier weather, I think: 

Happy Spring!