Maintenance

So in anticipation of my pasta roller attachment arriving this coming week, I decided that it may be time to clean my mixer. There’s caked in flour in the cracks, the tilt lock doesn’t fully work, and at times it sounds like it’s running rough.

Procrastination searching for a while helped me figure out a few things. This video helped me fix the tilt lock in a few minutes. Easy win!

But it still needed some work. More videos later (One, Two) and this site, told me I didn’t have the materials to regrease the gears now. But there was one video that showed me that I can deep clean it and there will still be a significant improvement. I’m not going to go over the steps, the videos explain it well; but here are some of my pictures.

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These aren’t all the nooks and crannies that I had to get into. I did use a healthy amount of Barkeeper’s Friend on all the surfaces and that cut cleaning time. Also using toothpicks and q-tips to get into the tight spots helped a lot. Getting the motor head off was the most difficult. The pin was way too tight and had to be hammered out (and back in).

The fact that I’m seeing a lot of oil probably means that the grease in the motor is breaking down. I will have to prioritize opening it entirely up this summer. I’m thinking that I may host a mixer maintenance party for anyone else that wants to make this a group project. (Assuming shelter-in-place is over)

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It really does look like it’s back to new, aside from the scratches. Maybe I won’t wait fifteen years to do this again. Now off to order gloves (and get on the backorder waitlist), food grade machine grease, and degreaser.