The New Hotness

Our KitchenAid mixer gets plenty of use turning out bread dough, but it tends not to get moved around a lot, because it’s an awkward and top-heavy bit of gear. Mary moved it recently and discovered oil puddles underneath. The scene put me in mind of my parent’s 1957 Studebaker President: it had a bad rear main seal and the oil leaked out just slightly slower than we could pour it in.

Anyhow, it seems our mixer isn’t the only one to have a slight incontinence problem, as a casual search on the obvious keywords will reveal.

I usually leave the mixer angled up, which caused the oil to drain to the rear of the housing, where it followed the main support strut downward into the stand. From there, it spread out and dripped off several local minima, forming perhaps four puddles. Most folks leave it horizontal, whereupon the oil evidently drips out of the lower cover into the bowl.

The rear view of the guts shows the oil oozing out both sides along the bottom of the joint between the housing and the end bell.

A rag and some denatured alcohol cleaned things up pretty well, but I do wonder what’s going on with KitchenAid… I’m not looking forward to replacing the piece-of-crap plastic bevel gear that evidently strips out after a while.