Digging into its guts...
Well, I just got finished taking the old cord off of the mixer, and what a chore that was. I literally had to take the motor halfway apart to do it. The good news is that aside from being grimy as hell inside, the motor is in good shape. Plenty of life left on the carbon brushes, and the commutator looks good. Interestingly, the motor is not a self-contained unit. The body of the mixer IS the motor housing. Yeah, they just don't build 'em like they used to--and more's the pity. I just hope I can get the thing back together properly. As I have been disassembling things, I have been putting components into Ziplock baggies to keep straight what goes where. Thank goodness for those YouTube videos. I'm sure I'll be watching them a few more times.
As you may recall, the old cord was wrapped entirely in electrical tape, Just for fun and to satisfy my curiosity, I unwrapped all the electrical tape from the entire length of the old cord. It appears that it had gotten melted in three or four spots in the middle of the cord from laying across a burner on the stove. Yikes! It's definitely too scary to go back on the machine, so I'm debating between two replacement candidates I've found in my spares, both from vacuum cleaners, imagine that! I had originally thought to use a gray one I had removed from my Sanitaire S645, but I've also got an off-white one from an Electrolux Discovery II. The gray one would definitely look better, but it's about 30 feet long, and it's been on my to-do list for several years to cut it off where it's damaged, losing about four or five feet in the process, and making a nice 20-25-foot extension cord out of the remainder. The Electrolux cord wouldn't look quite as nice, but not bad, and of course I'd clean it thoroughly. But as that cord is much shorter already, at about 20 feet, so it would result in much less wastage. Besides, it would probably be the only KitchenAid mixer in existence with the Electrolux brand name embossed on its plug.
