Golmer's Blog

So we have a nice Whirlpool front-end loading washing machine. Works like a champ - even though my spousal unit repeatedly overloads it with a few metric tons of towels. Oh it complains and walks around a bit, but gets the job done.

Until now…

So my son calls me at work and says the washing machine was making a lot of racket and walked a couple of feet across the floor. He had to wrestle with the thing long enough to press the button for 3 seconds to cancel the cycle. I told him I’d look at it when I got home.

Well, basically, the washing tub on the machine is surrounded by concrete blocks (about 150 pounds worth), is suspended in place by two big springs from the top, and has four shock absorbers mounted underneath to dampen and absorb all of the movement caused by unbalanced loads (such as said metric shitload of towels). Each shock absorber is held onto the tub (and the washer chassis) by - you guessed it - plastic brackets. One of the plastic prongs broke on one of the shock absorber brackets, which caused its connection to the tub to fail. That, coupled with the unbalanced metric shtiload of towels moving at several hundred RPM on a spin cycle, sufficed to rip away the remaining three shock absorbers. This allowed the tub to move several inches in every direction (instead of the designed inch or so) - hence the machine walking across the floor. It also allowed the forward edge of the tub to gouge chunks out of the pyrex-like glass door, but it seems to be solid and doesn’t leak.

So I spent the evening constructing a new connector bracket for the one broken shock absorber and reattaching them all to the tub. I welded a metal bracket - complete with bolts, nuts, and lock washers. I probably over-engineered the bracket, but at least the one I replaced will never fail in the same way again. (oh, and the plastic bracket, whatever plastic it is made out of, is not PVC - I tried to glue it with PVC glue and an acetone based glue as well - no joy.)

So all is back to normal. I think I’ll eat my dinner now.