So, the old mangle in the workshop finally gave up the ghost the other day. Just stopped. Mid-press. Made this awful grinding sound and then… nothing. Silence. Annoying, because I actually use that thing quite a bit for flattening larger pieces after gluing.

First things first, I checked the obvious stuff. Power cord pushed in? Yep. Breaker tripped? Nope. Gave the emergency stop button a whack, reset it. Still dead. Knew I’d have to get my hands dirty.
Taking the beast apart
This mangle is heavy iron, proper old-school. Took some effort just to get the covers off. Found about a decade’s worth of dust and fluff packed inside. Cleaned that out first, hoping maybe it was just overheating or something simple. No such luck.
I started looking at the mechanism. Motor seemed okay when I spun it by hand, no terrible noises there. Followed the drive train. Aha. Found the culprit. A small gear, maybe made of pot metal or some cheap alloy back in the day, had basically disintegrated. Half the teeth were just gone, sheared right off. That explained the grinding sound.
- Checked the main drive gear: Looked okay, surprisingly.
- Checked the rollers: Bit worn, but turning freely.
- Checked the belts: Looked old but intact.
So it was definitely just this one little gear. Simple, right? Wrong.
The hunt for the part
Figured I’d just order a new one. Pulled out the broken gear, cleaned it up, looked for a part number. Nothing. No markings at all. Typical. Tried searching online using descriptions, measurements. Found things that looked close, but nothing exact. The tooth count, the shaft diameter, the thickness… always something slightly off.

Called a couple of repair shops that deal with older industrial stuff. Sent them pictures. Both basically said the same thing: “Good luck, mate. They don’t make that specific gear anymore. Machine’s too old.” One guy suggested getting one custom machined. Yeah, right. For the cost of that, I could probably buy a new (and likely much worse) machine.
Trying to make it work anyway
I wasn’t ready to give up. Spent a whole afternoon trying to figure out if I could somehow bodge it. Maybe build up the broken teeth with some kind of metal epoxy? Tried that. Let it cure overnight. Put it back in. It lasted about two seconds before shattering worse than before. Waste of time and epoxy.
Thought about maybe scavenging a similar gear from something else I had lying around. Rummaged through boxes of old motors and mechanical bits. Found a few gears, but nothing matched the size or tooth profile needed to mesh correctly with the other parts.
The end result (for now)
So, after messing about for the better part of two days, the mangle is still broken. It sits there, covers off, guts exposed, mocking me. I put the broken gear pieces in a little plastic bag and taped it to the machine, just in case I stumble across a miracle replacement someday at a flea market or something.
It’s frustrating. It’s a solid machine otherwise, built to last, except for this one cheap little part failing. Everything’s designed to be thrown away now when one tiny bit breaks. I hate that. But honestly, I don’t have the time or the money to get a custom gear made for this old thing right now. So, it’s a broken mangle, and it’ll probably stay that way for a while. Back to using clamps and heavy weights for flattening, I guess. Slower, but it works.
