Rent

I'm back home now, so along with that comes the urge to do projects. Since I'm living at home, I'm not paying rent. In this area, that's quite a lot of savings. I feel I should contribute somehow for my rent, so I've taken to looking around the house for fixer-uppers. When doing my first load of laundry, I recognized my first opportunity.

While I have never been subjected to its wrath, the dryer has been known to be particularly brutal on buttons and zipper pulls. We all knew why, and various fixes had been implemented over the years, but still no permanent fix had been found. Also, in cleaning out the linen trap, it was obvious there was quite the accumulation of lint in the "exhaust" piping. This excess lint has actually caused other dryers I've had to fail (gets on the coil, starts a small fire which causes the wire to break). What started out as a simple cleaning project quickly grew into something much bigger. Here's what I found

The recovered items:


The culprit - the crack/gap in the lower right of the opening:


I ended up taking the dryer completely apart, including the blower/motor on the bottom. In this picture, I've cleaned the ducting as well as the inside of the dryer and have reattached everything. I over-filled the vacuum getting all the lint!


While I really wanted to fix it completely that day, we couldn't find a local parts store. We did find one online that offered the items for about half of what they would cost from GE directly so I placed an order and waited for them to arrive. Incidentally, in the process we learned that there are 4 teflon gliders that the drum sits on. They help reduce friction and therefore motor and part wear as it turns. As you can guess, they'd never been replaced and the dryer is at least 15 years old. I figured they had probably long-since worn out.

Yes they had! To make it more obvious, here is a picture of the replacement parts next to the old parts. The drum had worn down the bearing guide so much that it, too needed to be replaced.


It all snaps in pretty easily so I actually installed all this before heading into work on Tuesday. Here is a view of the finished project from the inside...


plus one from the outside. Sorry for the rotation, but blogger is insisting on importing it in this orientation even though I've rotated the original.


And with that, my first project at home is completed!