Got this really nice Kitchen Aid mixer for our wedding a year and some odd months ago.  Heavy thing.  Wow! Real metal.  So not long ago the thing craps out on Melanie while she is mixing dough.  Ok.  Piece of crap.  Bastards.  So Mel finds that there is a you-tube vid showing how to fix it.  Sure enough.  Very cool.  Screw driver-  a thin punch - a hammer.  No prob.  ? The vid starts with a guy saying that if the mixers mixing mechanism is not turning, it is probably because of a nylon gear that the manufacturer puts in as a sort of “safety overload” devise.  In other words, if you put the mixer under too much load, this nylon gear strips out to “protect the motor”.  Hummmmm.   Really.  Why don’t they just put one of those overload breakers like on my garbage desposer?  Or leave a metal gear and let the person making bread figure out for themselves that they are about to blow the motor.  I think this is more a case study in planned obsolescence than an attempt to save a motor from overload.  You know, we use to make lousy appliances and machines because we didn’t really know how to make them well.  Now we have all the knowhow we need to make a mixer, or a washing machine, or a refrigerator last a very long trouble free time.  But we don’t.  Instead all our ingenuity goes into figuring out just the right way to make it break, and under just the right circumstances, so as to cause a person to buy another rather than fix the one they bought.  My grandma bought one kitchen aid mixer and it last her -- well, it was working when she died.  Ours last a year and a half.  It’s cool that I could fix it.  $25.00 for a part and shipping.  But how many people are really going to do that?  It’s kind of staggering to think about all the resources, and aggravation, and landfill, and money, that are needlessly waited because companys have to  keep the sales coming in.