Caturday

Jake hears a bird outside, but he is not motivated enough to go to the window to look:

I had to keep him away from yesterday's home project: Regreasing my Kitchen Aid mixer.

In the directions that I downloaded, the guy uses wheel-bearing grease. That is a bad idea. If any of the grease liquefies and drips out into your food, it'd be like adding a few drops of machinery oil to your food. If you use food-grade, you won't contaminate your food if that happens.

Something else, if you do it yourself, see the big gear on the right that has a shaft?

That gear does two things: It drives the accessory drive on the front and the shaft is what drives the rotating parts of the mixer. When apart, the gear slides up and down on the drive shaft. The drive shaft has a cross-pin that fits into a channel on the top of the gear:

The top of the drive shaft rotates inside a housing at the top of the mixer itself. If that pin is not inside the channel when you try to put the mixer back together, it won't fit. Of course, at that point, you can't really see the pin because the gear and shaft have fresh grease on them.

I won't tell you how long it took me to figure that out.* It came to light when I was wondering if maybe the sacrificial gear (it breaks if the thing freezes up) in the gear tower wasn't meshing with the worm gear on the motor. So I put an allen key through the pin hole at the bottom of the shaft and tried to turn things, but the shaft moved and the gears didn't. That's when the 4-watt light bulb glowed and I wondered how torque got transmitted if the shaft could move independent of the gear train.
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* Long enough that throwing the entire mess into the garbage can was up for consideration.