Just a couple of days ago, I was mulling over a post on the Kitchenaid vs. Hobart mixers. Our 30 year old Ultra Power mixer is showing its age. When dealing with stiff doughs, it sounds like the motor is bogging down and ready to quit. There's also an issue with the size of the bowl - my wife would like a mixer with room for larger batches of stuff. We had heard that Kitchenaid went back to metal gears in their mixers, so we were looking at the Kitchenaid Pro 600, which goes for $550. We also looked at the one Hobart counter top mixer, which (of course) appealed to us for its indisputable ruggedness. These go for ~$2100 new, which is way more than we'd pay, but they seem pretty common on Ebay for around $550 - 600. My post was going to ask for opinions on those two options, but this became a non-issue today. We were at the "Antique Fair" that's held once a month under one of the freeways here and came across an older K5SS with the Hobart brand on it. It was very clean and had been picked up at an estate sale. Price was $115. It's on the counter now and so far, appears to work just fine.