The pin needs to slide behind the wall to the right, so that the attachment can slide down the groove visible just past the wall. If the pin extends further outward, it can’t get past the wall, and the attachment cannot be removed.

It’s a warm day in Texas, so I’m baking bread today. At the end of kneading the bread in my Kitchen-Aid, I go to remove the dough hook, and it won’t come out. It looks as though the pin that holds the hook in place has extended outward so that the attachment can no longer rotate into the groove that lets it detach.

This is apparently not an uncommon problem with Kitchen-Aid pins. After pounding on it a few times with a screwdriver, a quick search of the Internet brought the suggestion that maybe I’ve run the Kitchen-Aid for so long that the pin expanded from the heat and needs to cool.

That seemed—and was—utterly crazy. Yes, metal expands, but it shouldn’t expand that much. However, other suggestions involved using WD–40 or rust remover on the pin. That led me to believe that the pin can move on its own; a closer look at how attachments attach, and I discovered that if the pin moved outward it would move past the attacher rim and block the attachment from rotating far enough to be removed.

A small c-clamp can push the pin back into alignment with little effort.

Since I was pretty sure that the pin hadn’t moved and then rusted after twenty minutes, I eschewed the harsh chemicals and got a small C-clamp and screwdriver. It fixed the problem in a few seconds. Most clamps nowadays seem to come with easy twist-bars, so you may not even need a screwdriver.

My clamp opens about 1.5 inches; a smaller one should work fine^•, a larger one might be unwieldy.

The photos show the fix: attach the clamp so that the moveable arm is on the Kitchen-Aid’s attachment pin and the immovable arm is to the back of attachment neck. Tighten the clamp by hand, and then, if the pin doesn’t move when tightening by hand, tighten using the screwdriver until the pin moves in. If the pin has only recently moved out, it shouldn’t take much force to push it back in.