fixed it myself~!

HEY – A Quiet moment can produce wondrous results…
I was a lucky shopper at a recent Healdsburg Estate sale & carried out a genuine 1955 Kitchen Aid – Model 3C. It is a beauty & an almost solid metal appliance – made to whip cream, beat eggs, mix cake batter, even make mayonnaise – back in the day when things were built to last forever.
After cleaning it up & admiring it on my vintage kitchen counter, we got around to using it for some whipped cream. The first few moments of service seemed as I remembered just before I put my money down in that original kitchen in Healdsburg …a nice starter speed, then speeding up as I took the dial to a higher setting. We turned it off, added some honey & vanilla – & then it just didn’t act right! The speed seemed variable & unrelated to the setting…oh, darn! Had I just bought yet another thing destined for the landfill? Hmm, maybe I could start a restaurant & put this in the window? Maybe Laurel will do the bakery & SHE can put it in the window?…Thoughts running rampant – until the next day – I took a quiet moment & instead of cleaning, gardening, reading email – I did a thing unusual for me – I decided to try & fix the darn thing!

Turns out it has a nice & tidy simple screw that allows you to open the beater mechanism – which was simply a simple hollow area surrounded by a cog & filled with wadding, some really OLD black grease & a heck of a lot of old cake batter!
A few moments later after dropping the important & irreplaceable screw thingie only once before containing it into a jar lid – I proceeded to clean the area out, apply sewing machine oil to all moving parts & then – deciding for expert advice – I called RJ for some thick grease. Turns out most guys have a grease gun around just for such uses…imagine that!  The next day it was brought over & together we determined how much grease to put into the fairly clean wadding, (no, I didn’t change the wadding although it looked vaguely familiar but was not really on my list of things to shop for right now) into the hollow areas plus a little onto the cogs in both parts of the machine works. A few minutes later I was back in business with the Kitchen Aid humming properly at every speed. Now, that is a story that needs to be repeated…
1- I did it almost by myself – using woman’s intuition & a lifetime of some experience with small machines (sewing machine, bike)
2- This older model appliance is made of parts intended to be serviced!  That is the real lesson of this tale – we need to find ways to make things again that aren’t meant to be dumped in a year & a day…
3- And…always good to have a grease gun around with some nice fresh light colored real good grease.
4- Must take quiet moments to make life happier & relieve upsets over small things…
5- Got to bake more, or get right person to bake using old yet happily working mixer appliance.
6- Keep RJ around for grease & other great reasons…

See ya in the kitchen,
Annie