If you own a pre-2006 KitchenAid Professional 600, be aware that it will probably come to a grinding, screeching halt if you make a lot of bread. When it crashes you will be assaulted by one of the most painful and soul-crushing sounds you are likely to hear in a kitchen. Your beautiful mixer is dead. What is worse, KitchenAid just doesn’t give a damn.
My Professional 600 was a gift from my wife, who thought she was buying her bread-crazy husband the biggest, baddest mixer on the block. It is certainly marketed that way.
The overachiever of the stand mixer family, it has a Flour Power rating of 14 cups. That means it can mix enough dough for 8 loaves of bread or 13 dozen cookies in a single bowl … Powerfully churns through yeast bread dough and triple batches of cookie dough.
So why did my 8-cup soft sandwich bread recipe kill it? As it turns out, the Professional 600 mixers made before August of 2006 have a plastic gear housing that is completely inadequate for the size of the motor. Put a strain on the mixing head — bread dough, for instance — and the housing flexes, throwing the whole gear train out of alignment. When that happens the gears strip, locking up the whole assembly and causing an ear splitting shriek that will be etched in your memory forever. It is a horrible sound. Kitchenaid redesigned the gear housing in 2006, replacing it with a metal housing capable of taking the load put out by the motor. They repaired the Professional 600s that died under warranty but didn’t put out a service bulletin or recall notice for the others. We were left on our own. You see, the mixer doesn’t self destruct the first time you use it, the problem is cumulative. The flex gets worse with time until one day the gearbox flexes just far enough to cause a train wreck. It happened often enough that the KitchenAid engineers built a new gearbox. They just didn’t tell the rest of us. It took an engineer with a dead mixer to find out why the gears stripped the way they did.
My mixer is out of warranty so I wanted to see what my options were. I did a little research and found dozens of other Professional 600 owners who experienced exactly the same symptoms and mixer death. One of them was an engineer who took his mixer apart. It was he who discovered why the gears stripped the way they did. There was a detailed analysis with photos on his website, but it is no longer available. Given that this was a known design flaw — one that KitchenAid admitted when redesigning the gearbox — I asked them to cover the repair of my mixer. They refused, charging me $150 to replace the gears and gearbox housing. Their condescending customer service representative claimed A) that mixing 8 cups of flour for seven minutes, rather than the recommended five, was responsible for the lockup that killed the mixer, and B) that while the gearbox did indeed crack, the gears stripped first, so the gearbox couldn’t have been the problem. I pointed out that the gearbox flexes, causing the gears to strip before the housing cracks but she didn’t want to hear it. The problem was obviously my fault, and her tone suggested that I was probably lying about only mixing 8 cups of flour. It was an infuriating conversation. In short, Kitchenaid markets the Professional 600 as a heavy duty mixer designed to knead bread dough knowing that 90% of their customers are going to be making cakes, cookies and meringues, which put no strain on the motor. It’s the 10% of us who do bake bread (or use the meat grinder) on a regular basis who are screwed because KitchenAid won’t stand behind its products.
I suggest you submit this to http://consumerist.com. They have a decent track record of displaying this type of bad publicity in a forum known for outing companies with poor service.
The worst that could come of it, is that others will know that KitchenAid is not all that great.
[...] They were made by Hobart and built to commercial specifications. Newer KitchenAid mixers certainly can and do burn out, and their customer service sucks. The link is to my own miserable experience with a fried Professional 600. The earlier versions [...]
I bought a 5qt mixer and returned it after it burn’t out. I thought the 600 model could handle my dough. I went through one mixer that they replaced the second one burn’t out one month past warrenty expired. Costumer service
was no help. I am back to making several batches of dough in my bread machine. I am sorry I didn’t learn my lesson. I should of saved up for a Magic Mill Mixer. I wish we could do something the mixer is top rated. I have a friend that had the same problem and only uses her’s for whipping egg whites.
Hi Chad. Empathy for the mixer issues. This isn’t the first concern I’ve heard over the 600 after visiting the kitchen aid forums & others.
Bread was a strong consideration in my mixer search. I ended up with the Bosch universal. It’s not as exemplary as the top mixer design for delicate mixing of things like icing etc, however, for bread/thick cookie dough I haven’t used anything better. What convinced me on this model was reliability in the design. There just isn’t anything to fail as it is belt driven. These things apparently go for years and years. A bonus with the Bosch is the compact design for under cupboard use. Thoughts for your readers to consider.
Thanks for the read.
And that’s why I have a Kenwood….
I have a DLX after killing two KA’s. Mixed eight pounds of cookies last night and routinely do eight loaves of bread at a time.
I bought a Viking mixer, and I love it. I make bread every week and have used the mixer for grinding meat and stuffing sausage. The meat grinder is metal, not plastic like the kitchen aid grinder.
Chad,
Because I am very happy with the MAC Pro knives you recommended, I wanted to know if you would buy a post-2006 (metal gear box) KitchenAid Professional 600? I was looking at them, but I am a bit concerned because it looks like you must remove the attachments before you can remove the bowl. This seems like more of a hassle than tilting the head. Is it that big of a deal?
Second for ease of use, durability, etc. what mixer would you buy if you wanted to spend $400? How about $600? Thank You.
At this point, I just don’t know. I recently got my Professional 600 back from Kitchenaid for its second (second!) refurbish. The first time they replaced the gearbox housing with the newer metal version. The gear train still failed making a simple enriched bread dough. We’ll see how long it lasts this time. When you make everything from scratch, as we’re doing now, a heavy duty mixer is a must and the Kitchenaid just isn’t reliable or sturdy enough for the job. For the average household it’s probably fine. I bake a lot of bread and make sausage regularly, things that seem to strain the motor beyond its design capacity (despite KA’s marketing). If you bake cakes and cookies and only occasionally make bread or pizza dough it would most likely hold up fine. I haven’t gotten one in for a thorough review, but I have read very good things about the Electrlux DLX from people whose opinion I respect. That’s probably what I would get if I were starting from scratch. Right now I’m after the holy grail — a used Hobart N50. If I can get one for around $800 I’ll be a very happy man.
I too am having issues with this very model. I was so excited to have purchased my first one just over 2 years ago. 2 weeks after my warranty was up the gears stripped. I called KA and they, surprisingly, replaced it with a new model free of charge. One year and 3 months after I received that one they stripped again in the middle of mixing a batch of pizza dough using only 9 cups of flour. I am so aggrivated! How dare they! I called again and they are sending me a refurbished model with a 6 month warranty. I wish there was something I could do to get a full refund from them and just go to another company. I’m very disappointed!