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Comment by nivenhuh | Hacker News Reader

Kitchen aid stand mixers converted from using metal gearing to plastic gearing in their consumer stand mixers. After a certain amount of use, the gear wears out and costs $50 for a replacement.

The commercial line still uses metal gears. The maintenance on it is to check grease/lubricant after a certain amount of use.

(We used the stand mixer daily. Our home edition lasted 6-9 months before needing a gear change. The commercial edition has been going strong for a few years now.)

I’m sure there’s a reason why they moved to a fail-safe gear for consumer use — but as a consumer — I have no clue what that reason is. (We do ask a lot of our mixer tho!)

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I have one of those mixers and I've replaced the sacrificial gear at least 3 times, although I usually get the gears for far less than $50. I gotta learn to not overload it with bread dough :-)

Based on what I see when I open up the unit, the reason they don't have an all metal gear train is that doing that would impose the need for higher strength on everything in the transmission and the chassis up to the motor. That would increase the cost to the point where it would cut into sales.

The larger consumer mixers (6qt?) are built more heavy duty since I know that they can take a larger vertical load, but I don't know if they also have the nylon gear.

They can use glass reinforced plastic instead, and powdered metal or nylon gears like the mid range $150 consumer drills...

I think I may have misunderstood GP's post. I thought they meant that one of the gears was changed to plastic (as in mine) with the rest remaining metal. But it's more likely that they meant that the newer models are now using a fully plastic geartrain based on what I've read since.

Why not a shear pin? There's no need to make the (more expensive) gears the shear point when you can use a pennies-each shear pin (or shaft, or similar).

No idea. I didn't design the thing :-)

> I’m sure there’s a reason why they moved to a fail-safe gear for consumer use — but as a consumer — I have no clue what that reason is.

As someone who just infrequently uses their gifted kitchen aid mixer let me offer a new perspective.

I’d be ill-inclined to use it if I had to oil my kitchen equipment. That’s the reality. I use it once a month, and i would be turned off if I had to add lubricant. I’m an engineer, I get why it’s good, I get the purpose, but it’s just one more chore I wouldn’t do.

Does the plastic gear break if you attempt to recreate "will it blend" videos at home? They probably try to sell this as a safety feature.

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