Saturday, February 4, 2023
This is a little different post for me. A week or so ago I heard a loud popping sound on one side of our dishwasher. All of a sudden when opening the door it dropped like a stone. I had to hold it and it was heavy. A quick google revealed that the spring on one side of the door had either broken or come undone. As I looked at parts they showed a spring and a piece of nylon cord with plastic ends. What I could not find was a diagram showing how the spring was supposed to look when properly in place. The parts diagram showed the spring and the cord but they were floating off to one side. I couldn’t figure out how the spring and the cord worked to take the weight of the door.
The directions on the parts web site said that the job took 15 or 20 minutes. They lied. Or perhaps they never replaced a spring and cord on a dishwasher. The directions said: cut the power, pull the dishwasher out 10 or 12 inches …
Okay, I pulled it out that distance and couldn’t go any farther. I had removed the front panel of the door too. Well, it turned out that you didn’t need to take off the front panel of the door. I thought you did to get at the door hinge. I couldn’t imagine what the hinge looked like. The side panel, which it became clear I had to get to stretched all the way to the back of the machine. that meant I had to pull the machine completely out from under the cabinet, but I couldn’t. The water line and then the electric wires held me back. They needed to be detached. To get to the shutoff under the sink meant taking all the bottles out of half of the sink. There was quite a bit of time making sure I had to do both.
Once the water line and electric wires were disconnected the machine came out easily. There were two screws in the very back that held the side panel in place where it wrapped around to the back. I don’t think understand how the folks who wrote the directions on line thought pulling the machine out ten or twelve inches was going to do the trick.
Once I got the side panel off I could see how the spring mechanism worked. The hinge is an L shape and one end of the cord is attached to the upright piece of the hinge. The cord then passes under a plastic roller. The other end of the cord attaches to the spring and the other end of the spring attaches to the side of the flange of the dishwasher casing. It would have been real handy to have seen a diagram or photo of that.
Okay, now I’ve got the spring in place and I need to put on the side panel, put together the front of the door, and then I can scoot it back in place. But how am I going to get the water pipe to come through the curved opening? And what about the electric wires?
Ah, grasshopper. In a fit of brilliance I took a 2 1/2 foot s’more stick, which has a pointy end and passed it through the dishwasher tunnel to the end of the plastic water tube. The pointed end fit nicely into the flange of the tube. I taped the electric wires down so that when I pushed the dishwasher back they passed under the frame. It worked! The wires showed up close to the electric box and I was able to cajole the water tube through the tunnel. I hooked up both and tested the dishwasher by running a load of dish. No leaks!
The next morning I put in the kick plate, which I had left off to be able to see the water tube connection.
So how long did it take? Not counting putting the kick plate on the next morning. I started around 5:30 in the afternoon and took an hour or more to make and eat dinner. I watched TV for an hour. I was done about 12:30 am so seven hours minus two would make it five hours total. That’s a bit different than 15 or 20 minutes.
For those of you who might be tempted to say …
Don’t. Just don’t.
I didn’t get this in my email. That’s alright though because I knew you were changing a screw or fixing something or other that took 5 hours.
I am so very thankful that Sam is a really good fix-it guy. He can figure all that stuff out and fix it with only one trip to the hardware store!
One trip? Naw. Really? when I lived in Maryland there was a hardware store at the bottom of the hill. I can’t tell you how many times I’d have to go down there in the middle of a project. Every time as I would leave I’d yell, “this is the last time you’ll see me today!”
To which I’d receive a “Yeah. Right.” Reply.