About a year ago, I went to a restaurant supply store and bought a very nice ice cream scooper. It’s stainless steel and all that.
Here is how it is supposed to work. The bowl of the scooper has a pivoting piece inside of it that helps to push the ice cream out of it. You squeeze on the handle and the piece pushes the ice cream out into a very nice looking sphere (roughly).
The problem with mine is that the pivoting part is now stuck at almost a 90 degree angle to the bottom of the bowl of the scoop. It’s supposed to be flush with the outer edge.
No parts of the mechanism appear to be bent. You squeeze the handles and that causes some gears to move the pivoting part (I need a better name for that).
So, how do I get this back to its normal position.
For reference, here is what it should look like normally.
IANA ice cream scoop expert, but I’m guessing that a piece of the metal rod and spring assembly that pushes the pivoting scoop part fell out, or bent, or something.
Either way, it’s only $7.95. Buy another one? And this time get a one-piece…
Only a poor carpenter blames his tools for a crappy job.
An ice cream scooper should contain no moving parts. Nothing to break or lose. See this one for an example of one of the best.
It’s all in the wrist and the arm. You either have it, or you don’t. However, those with a quality scooper can still scoop just the right amount of ice cream with practice.
Does the moving thing (kind of a blade that slides along the inside on the scoop to “slice” off the icecream) travel through about a 180 decgree arc? So at the end of it’s arc, when it was working right, it ended up on the others end of the scoop, and now it ends up in mid-air but still travels a 180 degree arc?
If this is an accurate description of what’s happening, then the two meshing gears have slipped a few cogs. You can probably squeeze the blade in again to unmesh the gears, and turn the blade back to the proper starting point, and re-engage the gears.
I had that same scoop. For some reason ours worked fine for quite a while, then…it did that. After it did it once and we fixed it, it kept doing it over and over and over. For some reason I don’t remember exactly how we went about fixing it though.
After using pliers and such in an attempt to get the gears to mesh up correctly again, I believe the proper remedy will be to buy a new one.
I think the gears get out of whack once you try to scoop something that is a little too hard, such as frozen yogurt. Ice cream is softer and gives more, but frozen yogurt doesn’t have as much give to it.
Bob, I was at Wal-Mart today and I went and looked at one just like yours, and I’m blessed if I can see any way to get it apart and fix the gears. That’s obviously what’s broken, is the gears inside the thingie, but it’s welded together somehow, solid steel, and I don’t see how it comes apart.
As long as we were there, we bought a new one-piece, BTW.
The one I used to have, that made me able to diagnose the problem, had the meshing gears out in plain view. You could fix this problem without any tools at all
I’m sure somebody decided that visible gears were unappealing, old fashioned, or too difficult to clean if the ice cream got on them. So they they built some kind of fairing around the gears, and made them impossible to fix.
They probably got a bonus, because sales increased.
