As it turns out my wife is quite a good cook (no she doesn't pay me to say that :-) I somehow managed to make one of the best purchases in my life when I bought her a Kitchenaid 4.5qt mixer for her Birthday back in the early 80's. At the time these mixers were actually made by Hobart which makes professional mixers for bakeries, and god help them they just could not make an inferior mixer if their life depended on it. Then in the early 2000's Kitchenaid switched vendors for their 'entry level' mixers and the quality suffered greatly. The priceonomics guys could show you this by pricing out Hobart Kitchenaids vs non-Hobart Kitchenaids on ebay. The good news is, you can get a 20 year old Hobart Kitchenaid mixer and restore it to 'as new' condition, parts are readily available and they are pretty easy to work on.