Determined not to be beaten!
By Fleur
@Fleura (35062)
United Kingdom
March 21, 2017 5:18am CST
We have a Morphy Richards bread-making machine. Although some people swear by these producing fresh home-made bread every morning, I have to confess I’m not that fond of the bread it makes, to me it seems to have a strange texture; spongy on the inside but hard on the outside, more like cake than bread. But if I use the exact same recipe, use the machine to mix and knead the dough, and then bake it in the ordinary oven, it is delicious! Makes fantastic cinnamon rolls as well.
Consequently we use it quite a lot for the mixing. OK I know making bread is pretty easy but it does involve doing things at regular intervals which is awkward if you are out, so I put the machine on and then when I come back the dough is all risen and ready. I can also put it on in the afternoon and when Big One comes home from school it is ready for her to use, now she has got interested in cooking and trying different things.
But now it has stopped working. When I switch it on it still makes the usual sounds but the paddle doesn’t move, so the motor must be OK but the connection is broken. I could just throw it away but that’s not in my nature.
It turns out machines like this have a simple belt mechanism inside, the belt is easy to replace and replacements are cheap and easy to buy online from places like eSpares. The problem is getting into the actual inside of the machine. I examined ours; it has special security screws on the bottom. So I asked around and eventually found a place to buy a set of special screw-drivers and sent for them. Hey presto I could undo the crews. But then nothing happened, the bottom still didn’t come off. Bother.
We almost took it to the tip at the weekend but I balked at that and decided not to give up quite yet. I started looking on YouTube to see if I could find any tips. I found quite a few reviews and a couple showing you how easy it is to replace the belt once you have access to it (in different models of machine which are easier to open) but then I found this.
Not many things surprise me but I have to confess when he showed the second option I was a little taken-aback at this man’s sheer determination! Most people would have given up by now. I might take his advice – after all if it doesn’t work I don’t have much to lose.
All rights reserved. © Text copyright Fleur 2017.
Sorry for my terrible English and the low quality (my first video editing...) Thanks to Assaf Chen for filming (and the advices), and to Alex and Tom for sha...
8 people like this
8 responses
@owlwings (43897)
• Cambridge, England
21 Mar 17
I also use my bread machine mainly for mixing the dough because I prefer my loaves to be a more standard shape than the rather cubic one the breadmaker produces. It also gives me a chance to check the consistency and 'rise' of the dough before committing it to the oven.
I admire your determination in getting your machine open and replacing the belt (as you say, it's a simple job, once you have got inside!). Time, of course, is of little consequence if you can save the cost of a new machine and leave just a little less junk in the earth for future archaeologists to ponder over!
2 people like this
@owlwings (43897)
• Cambridge, England
21 Mar 17
@Fleura YouTube is a boon! Some manufacturers seem to delight in making something as difficult to repair as possible. It's quite obvious that the intention is that you should take it to a service centre which will make you pay through the nose. Very often, the 'special tools' you need are priced so high that it isn't worth the ordinary person's while to buy them (of course, 'accredited service centres' receive a set of tools free when they get their accreditation).
It occurs to me that the plastic used could probably be more easily cut with a hot wire or a very small soldering iron bit. I might actually try using a pocket knife blade (something with a bit more metal to it than a craft knife, so as to hold the heat better) heated in a gas flame. Trial and error would soon show how hot the blade needed to be to melt the plastic without setting fire to it. I'd still want to use gloves, of course. If you don't have any, try a garden centre for some decent leather gardening gloves. The ones the guy is using in the video are, I think, welder's gloves or bricklayer's gloves which you'd get from a builder's merchant.
1 person likes this
@Fleura (35062)
• United Kingdom
21 Mar 17
@owlwings I did think of trying to cut it with a hot metal something. We used to cut plastic flasks at work using an old knife heated with a Bunsen burner. I don't have such a convenient source of high heat at home and I don't work there any more, unfortunately.
1 person likes this
@Fleura (35062)
• United Kingdom
21 Mar 17
The guy in the video first explains that the 'proper' way to do it is to undo all the screws, which requires special hard-to-find tools, the screws are hard to get at and it exposes sharp metal edges on which you can easily cut yourself. He then shows an alternative way - which is simply to cut off part of the bottom the machine, which he manages with a simple craft knife and infinite patience!
2 people like this
@JudyEv (382240)
• Rockingham, Australia
21 Mar 17
@Fleura Have you heard the saying 'there is more than one way to skin a cat'? I'll call up @LoriAMoore to research the saying for us! 
2 people like this
@AbbyGreenhill (45490)
• United States
21 Mar 17
Never had a break machine. The few times we've made bread from scratch we did it the old fashioned way.
2 people like this
@AbbyGreenhill (45490)
• United States
21 Mar 17
@Fleura Time consuming is the only thing wrong with making it yourself w/o a machine.
2 people like this
@pgntwo (22405)
• Derry, Northern Ireland
21 Mar 17
Built-in obsolescence. Best deal is a 35quid machine from Lidl (3 year warranty) or Argos (1 year warranty) and when it breaks after warranty, recycle and repeat. We actually had a Cookbooks one from Argos that started to leak around the kneader after 10months - handed it back to Argos and walked out with a new replacement... We use it to knead the dough when I make pizza these days, so it is still working 2 years later. We did have an expensive one once, it did not last any longer than 18months...
1 person likes this
@Fleura (35062)
• United Kingdom
21 Mar 17
Some friends swear by their bread makers and others tried one and gave up. I dithered about it but couldn't bring myself to buy one when the outcome was so uncertain, but I was given this one on Freegle a few years ago and although I don't like the bread baked in it I'm rather attached to it's dough-mixing abilities!
1 person likes this
