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Friday, June 26, 2015

I think I need a new washing machine

I've known that there were problems for a long time.  They primarily focused on the part that locked the door shut for washing and told the machine that the door had successfully locked shut, but in addition to that assembly I was definitely growing ever closer to the day I needed a new door as well.  Somewhat rusted and hanging on one hinge, with the handle ripped off by some member of my family or other, the door had been abused to no end by people who didn't understand, and probably still don't understand, that while appliances are tough you should never force them.

If it isn't opening, for example, you're doing something wrong.  Trying to rip it open with great force will inevitably have bad consequences and it's somewhat lucky that all that happened there was ripping the handle off.  Of course this still didn't stop the philosophy of force.  It was and is entirely possible to open the handle-less door (the holes where the handle used to be were nicely finger sized and if it takes more than a finger to open the door something's wrong and you shouldn't force it), but since you can't really yank on something that doesn't have a handle my sister solved the "problem" by having a fork on standby that she could stick in the hole to make a temporary handle she could yank on.

So I've known that I'd need a replacement door (including hinges) on the outside, and a replacement door lock/door sensor mech on the inside for a while.

The internal piece being more important because the temporary fixes I was able to implement had the unintended side effect of making the machine stop each time it switched tasks meaning that I had to start it, wait a bit, manually tell it to spin, wait a bit, manually tell it to rinse, wait a bit, manually tell it to spin, and generally do that sort of thing.

That's fucking annoying to do, and so I've taken to going through all of the clothes that I can before, finally, the lack of anything clean forces me to do a wash.  Which was today.

New problem.  It doesn't spin.

My initial hope was that it was as simple as a disconnected belt.

Moving it into a position where I could access the motor left me with ... I guess you'd say gash.  I'd felt the pain, but not realized that it broke the skin until I later noticed my wrist was covered in blood.  the wound is actually very small, but it isn't a cut or a scrape. Some skin (very little mind you) was gouged off.  Apparently that makes the blood flow out of you quite a bit faster than a cut would.

Sweaty from moving the washing machine, a bandaid wouldn't stick.  (Like I said, the wound was small, a normal sized bandaid was of more than sufficient size.)  No problem, that's what ace bandages are for.  Wrap them around the part you can't bandaid.  I don't seem to have any of those.

I ended up with a sheet tied around my wrist holding the bandaid in place.

Anyway, back to the machine.  The belt was fine.  The motor simply does not go.  Not even a little.  Nothing.

So now it's a door, the locking mech, and the motor, and god knows what else.

Oh, and apart from it being a GE machine I can't find a damned thing saying what the machine actually is so I have no idea how to find replacement parts.

Motor repair is almost certainly beyond me.  If I can figure out what model the damned thing is maybe I can buy a replacement motor, and a replacement door-lock-thingy, and a replacement door.  But the more stuff goes wrong, the more it seems like the solution is to buy a new washing machine, if I can figure out a way to afford it.

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[Added:]

Got some good news.  I decided to yank individual parts and check for identifying information on them.  Obvious first part: locking mech.  Turns out it's known that if the locking mech is busted, even if it works enough to start washing a load, the machine will not spin.

That means that the motor is probably fine, which in turn means that the machine as a whole is probably fine save the door which needs to be replaced eventually and the locking mech which needs to be replaced as soon as inhumanly possible (help me out here gods) which means that instead of hundreds of dollars I'm looking at tens of dollars (so more in the realm of $79 than $799) and if I I don't pay retail (which: "Why would I?") I can probably cut that in half at least.

So good news all around except that I have a full load of sopping wet clothes because the machine won't spin and, since I didn't know that, I ran a load.

I've bypassed the locking mech before, I just have to figure out the best way to do it again, especially since I now know it runs two separate checks and it's possible I only know how to bypass one of them.

If anyone knows where to find good internal schematics of a "131763202 FRIGIDAIRE WASHER DOOR LATCH" that show how it was supposed to be to begin with (I only first opened it up after it had been broken) that might help me figure out where my repair of it went wrong.

1 comment:

  1. I know it's not a usual thing in the USA, but is it impractical to put your clothes outside to dry?

    ReplyDelete