The planetary assembly fell off my mixer and I cant get it to fir back on. I have a professional series 6 qt 575 watt kitchenaid.

My wife has the same model and the planetary unit fell off shortly after we bought it. Since we had moved overseas to a remote pacific island, getting it fixed under warranty was out of the question.

Since the rotary unit is a pressue fit, I pressed it back into place and it worked fine for about 3 months before I had to repeat the process. After that it became a monthly ritual.

I finally decided to fix it for good. What I did was drill a 3/8" hole in the center of the nub in the middle of the inverted rotary cover plate. I then drilled a 5/16" pilot hole in the center of the grooved shaft that the rotary cover plate presses onto. I then tapped that hole with a 18 NC tap. I was careful to tap it just a little shy of the depth of the cap screw that I was going to insert into the threaded hole so that it would jam as I tightened it. I then greased all the gears with a white machine grease and pressed the roary cover plate back onto the shaft. I then put a washer on a 5/16"-18 x 1" socekt head cap screw and clamped the thing together. It hasn't come off in the last 2 years.

While I am moderately skilled in this sort of thing it wasn't a precision operation. Since I was living in a fairly remote location with no shop, I did the entire operation on the kitchen counter using a handheld electric drill. Probably the hardest part was determining how deep to tap the shaft. I did it by trial and error. You can adjust the depth by using a washer or two of varying thicknesses.

I'm really surprised how lame a design using a press fit for this assembly is. They could easily prevent the problem by using my approach or even putting a cotter pin through the shaft and reciever tube in the rotary cover plate (a small hole would be needed in the side of the tube to set the cotter pin).

From what I've seen on the internet while looking for a solution, this is a fairly pervasive problem.

We thought we were buying a high quality machine that we thought would be reliable in our remote situation. Fortuantely, other than the falling rotary cover issue, the machine has worked great.

If you have a planetary that is falling off then you are missing a spring clip on the center shaft