Mr. Fix-It (Part 1)

So being a home owner is not all it's cracked up to be. Things break, and they need to be fixed.

A week or so ago, we had a string of bad luck… I don’t usually believe in such things, but it really seemed like Murphy’s law was really doing a number on us. One such incident happened as I was doing the laundry.

I was about to transfer what I thought were dry clothes to a clothes basket. Upon opening the door, I found damp clothes. Now as I am advancing in my years, it’s not too uncommon for me to forget to turn the darn thing on. So I wasn’t too surprised by this. So I set it up, hit the on button and to much surprise it didn’t sound right.

I opened up the door and found the magical light turning on, not unlike the magic light in the refrigerator. I could feel that heat had been blowing in, but the drum just would NOT turn.
Instant visions of an expensive plumber’s-crack sporting repairman charging me an arm and a leg ran through my head. After beating my head against the stairs to get this vision OUT of my head, I was bound and determined to fix this beast myself.

My good friend Cliff consults with his good friend Lord Google on a regular basis for any number of issue. I followed his example and started out my quest to fix the unholy dryer.

I was not all that surprised to find a plethora of sites that assisted me in my quest. Several wanted to charge me for the information, but others like myself seemed to be generous enough to blog about such incidents.

I narrowed the problem down to either the belt ($20) that spins the dryer drum or the motor ($100) that drives it. With the way my luck had been running lately, the pessimistic side of me focused on the higher ticket/more complicated fix. I forced myself to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

In the searching for answers, I even found a video that told me how to A) open the dryer and B) Replace the belt or the motor. Of you are at all interested you can see that here as well:

So after following their simple instructions and popped open the dryer and noticed that there was no belt around the drum. I flashed my flashlight down to the bottom and was rewarded with the site of a frayed end of belt. SCORE!

I found that the dryer belt had been pretty much shredded into tiny little piece which now coated the entire motor. After cleaning this up with the new Dyson vacuum (Another blog in the works), I hastely found the nearest place that I could find a new belt. This was NOT an item carried at your local Home Depot.

Ffter calling around to several places it turned out the be a ($20) trip to the nearest SEARS repair center. I rushed back home to install the belt according to the YouTube video instructions.

All went off without a hitch, and I was able to dry all of our clothes again. I was pretty pleased that I didn’t have to spend an arm and a leg to have someone else repair this and make me endure the inevitable view of pants that won’t stay up… AUGH!