Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The instructions you’ll find elsewhere tell you to just twist the head of the shock absorber a quarter-turn to release it. That’ll probably work, although I think you’ll break the two locking clips that hold the head in place, after which you’re depending on friction to prevent the whole affair from shaking loose.
The head is the small bump visible inside the white bracket on the tub. The locking clips are the tabs inside the square shape just under the bracket. It’s obvious when you see it, if you know what you’re looking for.
The trick is to use a small screwdriver to pry the locking clips downward while twisting the head. This is impossibly awkward, but you can get one started, lever the other one out, and then both will suddenly slide free as the head turns.
If you’ve removed the three concrete tub weights, the tub will rise up as you release each shock absorber. Mind your fingers!
In order to get the drum out, you must remove the Control Panel and Top Front Brace
Start by unplugging the ribbon cable from the side of the Machine Control Microcomputer. Note the cute little latch holding the connector plug in place. Things will not go well with you if you break that latch off; the plug will vibrate loose.
Control Panel plug at Machine Control unit
Unthread the ribbon cable from the clips all the way around the rear and right side of the washer body.
The Control Panel has three mechanical attachments:
Remove the screw behind detergent drawer on far left. Put the drawer in a tray so it doesn’t drool all over the place.
Control Panel – left screw
Unsnap latch inside the washer body on far right. By now you’ve removed the top, so just reach inside and shove the tab over a bit to the right to release the latch.
Control Panel – right-side latch
Unsnap latch in the middle. This one baffled me, but all you must do is push upward with a screwdriver (or maybe a dowel) inside the notch on the bottom of the Control Panel Cover directly above the middle of the door opening.
Control Panel – center latch
Then feed the ribbon cable through the opening.
Now you can get to the screws that hold the Front Panel in place. Don’t remove those until you disconnect the Bellow that seals the Tub to the Panel and unhook the Door Lock assembly.
It turns out you can get access to the extractor pump from the front of the washer, without having to take the back off and reach all the way through. If any of the problems we’ve ever had with the washer could have been fixed just by reaching into the pump, that’d be nice to know.
Remove three Torx T-20 screws at the very bottom of the lower front panel, known as the Toe Panel, and it drops right out.
If you have something jammed in the pump, you can put a tray underneath, unscrew the obvious plug, and bloosh water all over the place. I don’t know how you’d know you had something in jammed in the pump, but that’s how you get to it.
Our Kenmore HE3 washer emitted a dramatic KLONK that had all hands racing for the Cancel button. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, some Web searching, and a few hours of teardown, I determined that the washer had failed in the usual HE3 way: the cast aluminum spider connecting the back of the lah-dee-dah stainless steel drum to the shaft had corroded and fractured.
Now, class, let’s review our chemistry. What do we call a pair of dissimilar metals in an ionic solution?
Very good. Can you spell “battery”?
Bonus points: what happens to the battery electrodes as the current flows?
Excellent! I’m sure you can spell “corrosion”, too.
The stuff that looks (and feels!) like cheese is aluminum corrosion filling every nook & cranny in the back of the spider. The fact that the drum spins at 900 rpm tells you it’s rather tenacious gunk, but evidently we’ve been washing our clothes in corrosion products for several years.
If you have a Sears or Whirlpool HE washer, so are you.
Mary noticed the washer made a strange noise during the spin parts of the cycle, starting a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t anything you’d tear down the washer to diagnose. I’ll have more to say about that in a bit.
The KLONK happened when a third fracture finally disconnected the drum from the shaft and it started whacking against the outer tub. All that’s holding the shaft in place is the remaining thickness of the spider casting and the interlocking fracture pattern; I can move the shaft, but not easily.
Here are closeups of the three sections near the hub between the arms. Anything that looks like a crack really is one…
Corroded Spider – Fracture 1
The next section has a nice crack running along the circumference, too…
Corroded Spider – Fracture 2
And the third section…
Corroded Spider – Fracture 3
I hauled it to the driveway and hosed off the corrosion. There isn’t supposed to be that little hole where the sun shines through…
The new X10 controller on our dresser has a nice lid over the buttons. Unfortunately, the lid lacks any affordance to raise it: smooth edges all around, slick surface, no notches or bumps.
The obvious, albeit ugly, solution: add some black and very grippy rubber strips to the front and side edges of the lid. Now one finger suffices…
Griptivity Enhancement
Puzzle: how did the designers expect us to lift the lid?
I snagged this gem from the Deep Horizons spillcam site a while back; it’s a screen grab at 1600×1200 with all the extraneous junk cropped off. Scaling it back to fit a 4:3 screen doesn’t do it a bit of damage: it looks just as weird.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 