And Now For Something Completely Different...

Any Monte Python fans out there?  Anyway, I was prewashing a couple of lengths of my new fabric when I suddenly heard a whole lot of banging and bouncing and general wreckage coming from my laundry room last night.  I RAN down there and found this...


Everything from the top of the machine had been thrown on the floor and the rubber door seal was all twisted.  Now I've played this game before.  My last front loading washer died when my son overloaded it with about 20 pairs of jeans and tried to run it regardless.  It didn't end well.

The first thing I did was look up the warranty information.  I had purchased the five year extended warranty - yay!  But it expires... last January.  Boo!

I was going to bite the bullet and call in a serviceperson but thought I've got nothing to lose and it is probably a loose spring (from previous experience).  A google search quickly gave me the info I needed to break into this bad boy, usually the most intimidating part of fixing appliances.  With the cover off I quickly saw the loose spring


I wasn't strong enough to hold up the drum and stretch the spring to put it back into its slot, and Jeff won't be down to help me for a week and a half (sometimes long distance relationships suck, even after 20 years) - WAY to long to go without doing laundry (or pre-washing fabric) so I remembered the words of an old journeyman who I worked under as an apprentice - work smarter, not harder.  I tried to think of what I had in the house strong enough to do what I needed.  I ended up folding a wire coathanger in half (it was too long otherwise), hooking the double ends over the hook end of the spring and putting a prybar through the other end of the coathanger.  This gave me a means of pulling the spring up with both hands - doubling my strength against this spring and drum.



Very quickly (I was amazed how quickly!) I popped that spring hook right back into its slot.  Woohoo!  And the rubber seal?  Tadaa!


Right back to normal.  Of course I put another load in (including a length of fabric to be pre-washed lol) and all is well in my universe.  Whew!  Jacqui 1, appliance gremlins 0.

Comments

Anonymous said…
That's really helpful - this just happened to me. Exactly the same had to run downstairs as it was banging like crazy. The rubber seal exactly the same. Lucky still in warrantly so engineer booked bad news a week without a machine. I hope it's just the spring like yours!

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