Two Hobart planetary mixers dominate the used market: the H600 at 60 quarts and the A200 at 20. Both planetary, both gear-driven, both built to outlive the people who bought them new.
They are not alternatives to each other. A 20-quart bench machine and a 60-quart floor machine do different jobs, and anybody framing this as a value comparison is comparing a sedan to a box truck. Pick by capacity first. Then use everything below, because the failure story is the same family and the pricing story is where most buyers get hurt.
The $16,990 that does not exist
Start with a correction, because we published the wrong number to ourselves before we published anything to you.
The used H600 range circulating in our own research notes was $4,500 to $16,990. We went back to confirm the top end and could not. A targeted search for that exact figure against H600 and HL600 returned zero results. The two dealer pages most likely to carry it are JavaScript-rendered and returned page furniture with no product data. The $16,990 top end is unsourced and we are dropping it.
The sourced range, confirmed with direct fetches on August 19, 2026, is $4,500 to $14,500:
- $4,500 used H-600, the older gear-driven generation.
- $5,000 OBO used H600, 60 quart.
- $9,995.00 remanufactured: cleaned and tested, defective parts replaced, 30-day parts-only warranty, 4-speed with a 15-minute timer, 866 pounds.
- $14,500 used Legacy HL600 with automatic bowl lift, serial 31-1312-596, listed with the serial visible on the dealer page.
There is a second correction buried in that list. Our earlier notes attributed the $14,500 comp to a remanufacturer whose live listing actually reads $9,995. The $14,500 figure is real, but it belongs to a different dealer entirely. Search aggregation had welded a price from one page onto a URL from another. That is a normal way for pricing data to go wrong, and it is why we fetch pages rather than trusting summaries.
For scale on all of this: a new Legacy HL600-70STD lists at $44,469.00. That is the ceiling that makes every used number above look like a rounding error.
The spread might be generations, not condition
A $4,500 to $14,500 range on one model is wide enough to demand an explanation, and the obvious one is condition. We think the obvious one is probably wrong, and we want to flag this as a hypothesis rather than sell it as a finding.
Look at what sits at each end. The $4,500 to $5,000 tier is all listed as H600: the older pre-Legacy generation, gear-shift, no digital timer. The $14,500 tier is a Legacy HL600 with automatic bowl lift and an accessory package. Those are different machines with different feature sets, not the same machine in different states of repair.
If that is right, then most of the spread is generation and equipment rather than wear, and a buyer treating a $14,500 asking price as "the good ones cost this much" is misreading the market badly. It also means a $5,000 H600 is not necessarily a beaten-up version of a $14,500 machine. It may be a perfectly sound older machine that simply lacks a bowl lift.
We cannot prove it. Proving it needs a controlled comp set, same generation, varying condition only, which we do not have. So: hypothesis, from listing titles, flagged as an open question. The practical instruction stands either way. Any listing that does not specify H600 versus HL600, and does not spell out the accessory package, has not told you enough to price it.
The A200 market is tighter and better documented
Nine used A200 listings carried a visible dollar figure when we pulled comps on August 19, 2026:
$1,000 in Phelps NY. $1,500 in Millwood WV, one-third HP, sold without bowl or attachments. $1,800 in Bohemia NY, described as great condition, with bowl, whip, paddle, and hook. $2,273 with a stainless bowl and three attachments. $2,350 in Springfield MO. $2,350 in Sanford FL. $2,350 in Sanford FL again, with guard, bowl, paddle, hook, and whip. $2,738 for an A200T. $3,591 sold with a warranty.
Range read: roughly $1,000 to $3,600, with complete-with-attachments units clustering $1,800 to $2,750. Two non-US listings converting to about $1,693 and $3,047 were left out.
Note what the cluster tells you. The $1,000 and $1,500 units are the ones missing bowls and attachments. Accessories are not a rounding error on a mixer; a bowl, hook, paddle, and whip are a meaningful fraction of the price gap between the floor of that range and the middle. Price a bare machine as a bare machine.
One honesty note on sourcing: a single aggregator supplied every A200 comp above. eBay blocked or timed out on every attempt, one dealer's search URLs returned 404s, and another surfaced only new replacement parts. A range built from one source is thinner than a range built from four, and we would rather say that than imply breadth we did not have.
What a teardown actually found
The generic advice on used mixers is "listen for grinding, budget for a gearbox." True as far as it goes. A full A200 rebuild in our video evidence goes considerably further.
The machine came from a food manufacturer with two complaints: leaking oil from the planetary, and it would not go into second gear (00:00:09 to 00:00:16). Those are the two symptoms most likely to make a buyer walk. Here is what was actually inside.
Fasteners were loose or missing. Starting the transmission disassembly: "we are missing one screw" (00:06:21). A few minutes later, on another fastener: "oh, that's loose too" (00:08:15). Then a bent, broken component that clearly did not belong in that shape (00:15:48), which turned out to be at least part of the shift problem (00:17:37).
And the bearings, the expensive thing everyone fears, were fine. After working through the entire gear stack: "so far I've only found one bearing that I'm concerned about, and I'm not even that concerned about it" (00:23:06).
That maps exactly onto the documented A200 signature failure. The loose planetary retaining nut is the named pattern: the nut holding the planetary assembly works loose, the assembly slides down the shaft, you lose first gear, and if it goes far enough the planetary can seize on the transmission shaft. Oil leaking from the planetary and a gear that will not engage are the two symptoms it produces, which is precisely what that machine arrived with.
So when you inspect an A200: check whether the planetary has any play or slide on the shaft before you assume a gearbox is finished. It is the cheap end of the failure spectrum wearing the costume of the expensive end. A seized planetary is a different story, but a nut that backed off is not a dead mixer.
Why the H600 costs more to open
The 60-quart machine has the same failure family and much worse labor economics, and one video makes the point better than any estimate could.
The job was a hub replacement. A hub. Not a gearbox rebuild, not a gear stack, one component at the front of the machine. The tech's assessment, forty seconds in: "The entire transmission has to come out" (00:00:58). He repeats the reason later while it is on the bench (00:04:12), and warns that reassembly needs gasket maker on the mating surface or you will be back for a leak through the hub (00:07:45).
That is the H600 in one sentence. On this machine, small repairs are not small jobs. Stuck-planetary removal is described elsewhere as a three-jaw gear puller plus a heat gun bringing the collar to around 250F, a heavy two-person job that techs explicitly flag as something to hand to a service company rather than attempt yourself.
On parts, we have real numbers and we will be exact about what they cover. Gearbox and planetary rebuild kits for the H600 and L800 class run roughly $500 to $1,363 depending on scope, from an agitator shaft rebuild kit at the low end to a full gearbox bearing kit at the high end. Those are parts prices. We could not source a single installed "typical full gearbox rebuild, parts plus labor" total, and given what the hub video shows about teardown effort, the labor side is not a small addition. One rebuild vendor offers a six-month warranty on their work without publishing a price.
Rebuild-and-replace dollar ranges get quoted for these mixers with real confidence. We went looking for the sourced version of that number and it was not there to find, so what we can tell you is the kit price and the shape of the labor, and no more than that.
The inspection that separates cheap from expensive
Across both machines, the documented signals are consistent and easy to check:
- Grinding or clicking indicates worn or broken internal gears. Grinding specifically under load usually means worn gears or degraded lubricant.
- Metal shavings in the gearbox oil is a direct damage signal, not an early warning. Ask to see the oil.
- Oil leaks most commonly mean a worn gearbox seal or an overfilled transmission, and not necessarily gear damage. This one is worth negotiating on rather than walking from.
- Gear shift sticking is reported directly for the H600 on service forums, and is the A200 loose-nut signature.
- Run it under load. An empty-bowl spin tells you almost nothing. Grinding that only shows up loaded is exactly the grinding that matters.
Then ask the maintenance question that most buyers skip. Hobart recommends changing the gearbox oil every three to five years depending on usage, and the units that show gear wear are disproportionately the ones that never got it. "When was the gearbox oil last changed" is the mixer equivalent of asking a car seller about oil changes, and the answer sorts the machines faster than the hour count does.
These things outlive their owners
Hobart's own claim is that a well-maintained Hobart mixer easily lasts 20 to 30 years or more, with some sources saying over 30. The general planetary mixer category, all brands, runs 10 to 20 years with proper maintenance, and one source puts the average age of a classic commercial mixer currently in service at 24 years, though its wording leaves ambiguous whether that is Hobart-specific or across brands.
The trade also repeats two anecdotes: a 1919 Hobart that reportedly served a bakery for 87 years, and a 1914 unit that ran 93 years before retirement. Those are reputation evidence, not a forecast for the machine in front of you.
The variable that actually decides it is usage intensity, called out explicitly: two-shift daily bakery work wears a mixer far faster than occasional restaurant use. Age on a mixer is close to meaningless without knowing what the machine did all day.
What we would pay
The A200 at $1,800 to $2,750 complete with bowl and attachments, with the planetary seated tight and no play on the shaft, is buying at the documented middle of a real market. Under $1,500, check what is missing before you celebrate. We could not source A200 repair costs at all, so budget from the H600 numbers with the understanding that a 20-quart bench machine is a smaller job than a 60-quart floor machine.
The H600 at $4,500 to $5,000 gets you the older pre-Legacy generation, and if the gear shift works cleanly through all speeds under load, that is a lot of mixer for the money against a $44,469 new list. The Legacy HL600 at $9,995 remanufactured with a warranty, or $14,500 with automatic bowl lift, is a different purchase, and worth it only if you need the bowl lift and the timer.
Walk on either if there is grinding or clicking under load, visible metal in the gearbox oil, or a gear shift that sticks and an owner who cannot say when the oil was last changed. On the H600 specifically, walk faster, because the hub video is what the labor bill looks like even for a job that sounds trivial.
On recalls: no Hobart mixer recall turned up in a brand-level CPSC search, only unrelated toy and hand-mixer entries. That search did not query the CPSC database directly, and no A200-specific check has been run, so treat it as unverified rather than clear.
Parts availability is the one unambiguous good news. It grades excellent, with Hobart mixer parts stocked through Parts Town as an OEM-authorized channel plus several independent specialists. A 40-year-old machine you can still buy a gear stack for is a genuinely different asset from a 10-year-old machine you cannot.