Cooking

I recently attempted to cook something (of my own invention) which involved pureed apricots.  To perform this task I chose our venerable (approx 1989 vintage) Philips Storemaster all-purpose electric whizzing kitchen gizmo, which in addition to chopping, slicing, mixing, mashing, thrashing, juicing, pummelling etc has the unique feature of storing sumbunall* of its accessories inside its own back panel. 

*Sumbunall is a portmanteau word meaning "some, but not all".  See Robert Anton Wilson, "Quantum Psychology" if you have the time.

Here's the venerable Storemaster, poised ready for a grating task:

Storemaster

 and here's the back view, showing how it cleverly stores the dough hook, cake mixer, and twin blade attachments. Oh, and the mains cable (but not the mains plug, of course).

Storemaster, storing things

And finally, here are all the accessories it doesn't have room to store:

Store somewhere else, please

Anyway, it turns out that pureeing apricots is tougher than it sounds, and the poor old Storemaster jammed up, still whirring, and the twin bladed attachment ceased to rotate.  Thereafter, the transmission seemed to have gone, and the twin blades had no grunt whatsoever. Bugger.

Obviously this meant taking it apart (1989 remember, one Posidrive screwdriver and you're in there) and lo! A lovely aluminium-framed belt drive assembly with reduction gearing, driving a concentric shaft assembly with different outputs for high and low speed attachments.  Here's the overview:

Belt drive

and here's the shaft assembly, showing low speed output (green) which is all one piece with the big cog, and the high speed output (blue), driven by the inner shaft.

Innermost workings of the Storemaster

Unfortunately, that's as far as I could get. The blue bit would rotate on its shaft but not come off it, and the shaft it retained in the cog by an inaccessible circlip inside the conical part.  I guess the blue bit is pressed on, and originally had an internal shape which keyed it onto the shaft somehow (but no more). 

So, I drilled a 1mm hole (handheld - my drillpress won't go that small) right through the base of the blue part (being careful to miss the green part where it sits inside the blue part), and then used the broken-off shaft of the same drill bit as a dowel to key the blue bit onto the shaft.

I chose 1mm because I also have 1.1mm & 1.2mm drills which I thought might be needed for a nice tight fit, but actually 1mm was fine in the plastic.  I really didn't expect to be able to drill the (hardened?) shaft successfully either, but it turned out to be no problem.  Likewise, drilling a 20mm long hole with a 1mm bit, handheld, without breaking the drill bit seemed unlikely to work, but in fact it did.

So, a bit of cleaning up, silicone lubricant (OK for plastic apparently) and reassembly, and the Storemaster has been restored, again (last time I had to make it a new presser out of beech - you can see it in the top picture.  Beech is  top wood for kitchen implements). 

Just as well, because we need to make more kimchi (Korean fermented cabbage, a bit like sauerkraut but more interesting).  Yum!