Busted Breville Blender
September 12, 2020What does my blender do?
Honestly I have no idea, I think I only use it for laundering liquor into ice and old citrus which I pass off to my unsuspecting partner as “tiki drinks”. But she uses it a fair bit for juices and soups and all that loveliness. Aint nothing like turning tomatoes and roasted peppers out of the garden into a soup that you pepper with all the home made croutons from the busted sourdough experiments, making a wonderfully crunchy soup. So we got a need for one the food processor just aint scratchin, but it aint like its running nonstop grinding up the big bones the hogs wont eat ya know?
Where I fucked up
So couple years back, specifically in July 2016, I wanted to get a decent blender I wouldn’t just throw away. Not having opened up that many pieces of equipment to see the dirty fucking tricks and not yet a watcher of this mechanicy fellow (AvE), I decided to make a compromise. I wouldn’t shell out the $400+ on a Vitamix like the partner uses at work, and instead I’d pay $200+ to Breville for their “nice” blender at the time. America’s Test Kitchen rated it pretty well in performance and viewed the high end blenders as egregiously priced for the “average american home.” Alright I said, lets compromise.
So here we are, four years later, and the blender starts jangling, smoking, crunching, and overall sounding pretty grumpy. I checked, theres no TV in the kitchen, it can’t have seen anything about whats going on outside, its perscriptions are up-to-date, must be something else. Poke it a bit, motor seems fine, so probably a bearing out in the pitcher. So we do what we normally do, take a stab at fixing it ourselves because Maintenance is next to Godliness and I hate wasting things.
Pretty nice, got 4 normal screws to pop off the housing of the blade from the pitcher.
About here is where I started fucking up, because I thought the bearings were in that plastic housing, with the metal topper press fit onto it. And they were, just not as I expected. I was intent on getting that metal topper off. Hint: the metal topper is to make a good food grade seal as the pitcher base, and otherwise does not need to be removed. Prying it open with a screwdriver ensured I destroyed the part.
So here they’ve riveted the bolt onto the assembly, presumably for safety to ensure a blade doesnt go flying into someones unsuspecting face as they run the blender with no lid on. Yeah, we’ll buy that.
I have an unhealthy relationship with rivets. I dont like them, and I feed as many drill bits into em as needed until theyre gone. Luckily the bosch bits held up on this one.
Unfortunately I also drilled through the rivet and right into the bolt holding this thing together right to the base. Because if I didnt destroy the part up top there on the metal housing cover, I would have killed it off here.
What failed?
So if you look at the rubber grommet on the far right up there, it protects that rolling bearing from water. Guarantee after 4 years of putting the pitcher in the dishwasher because our sink is 6 inches deep, that grommet let in water. Bearing seized, thats all she wrote. To get it off though is to drill through that rivet very carefully with a drill press with a wide bit so you dont drill into the bolt itself. And before it goes back into the blender it would need to be sealed in a food safe way, assuming you know a way to get that press fit bearing off the shaft without damaging it. So far without a vice I’m unable to.
Now heres the sadness for me, is that breville doesnt sell parts. When they do sell parts, they sell the whole pitcher for $65 instead of a bearing for $3. But of course after 4 years ours has been discontinued and replaced by another model. By what you ask? Oh this one, which has ever so slightly different dimensions, is also $200, and is most definitely not a hemisphere blender.
Oh and for $20 you can get a 3 year warranty, not a 4. And if you don’t make parts available, were you ever intending on honoring it in the first place?
When you know ahead of time which part is going to fail out of a system, I think its intentionally malicious not to make that part easily available and changable. So we’re going to hunt around on ebay for some spares to see if I can get this perfectly fine motor working again, or else its off into the landfill like our society demands in the name of Gods of Profit.
Hermes Trismegistus
PS: AvE has both Blendtec and Vitamix teardowns. Vitamix wins I think, with quite a few vendors selling parts for the 5200.