The Movie Star
You may have seen this mixer on TV, or in a video on the Internet.
Author: Rich Siegel
The Unusual Ones Get Names
This is Flossie (she’s pink like candy floss), but nobody calls her that more than once. To all the folks at the diner she’s “Flo”. Flossie is an example of an extremely rare specimen: the Accolade 400. This is a …
Pro Series Disaster Recovery
The story begins the usual way: eBay listing of a mixer being sold “for parts or not working”, cheap. Had a bit of conversation with the seller, “it’s running a little rough”. No problem. I provide my usual packing advice …
Family Heirloom
Every so often I encounter someone with a really old machine that needs repair, or even just long-overdue maintenance. The owner is very reluctant to let the machine out of their sight, because it was a treasured gift, or handed …
“I’ve always wanted a blue mixer…”
It’s easy enough to buy a cobalt-blue KitchenAid mixer these days, but the color is really hard to find in older models. The KSM90 “Ultra Power” tilt-head was the first of the cobalt-blue machines; it was made as an “exclusive” …
The Cake Machine
This machine (1997 K45SS) was in excellent overall condition, requiring only routine maintenance. Unfortunately, the head lock lever was bent in transit (the mixer tipped over and landed on it), but that was easily resolved with a replacement latch mechanism …
Plastic Mythology
There seems to be a trope going around that modern KitchenAid mixers are specifically inferior to vintage ones because their “gears are made of plastic” (or a similarly phrased complaint). This is categorically not true. All of the gears in …
It’s Never The Motor Brushes
So, in “Hard Luck Cases“, I mentioned learning a valuable lesson. When I got the mixer on the bench, I didn’t even plug it in to see if it ran. Once I saw its overall condition, with the corroded power …
Hard Luck Cases
“Rusty” was another Goodwill find, a Hobart-era K5SS (bowl-lift, solid state speed control, 5qt bowl). This classic needed almost as much work as I’ve ever put into a mixer. Most of the time spent was just on getting through the …
Keep The Spring In Your Spring
Do you have a “bowl-lift” mixer, like a K5, KSM5, or any of the “Professional” series? Here’s a tip: when you’re not using the mixer, let the bowl rest gently on the bowl spring — don’t snap it in. (You …