The Neon Nurse's Charting

Some of my longtime readers might remember me complaining last year (!) that the dryer was not drying right and making a funny whompa-whompa-whompa noise.

Well, you know me. I efficiently got right on the job and looked up the problem on line and ordered the kit ( http://repair2000.com/tuneup.html ) to fix it.

Aaaand then, well, it was the busy holiday season, and stuff happened, and the sun got in my eyes, and my dog died (eight months later) and oh, yeah, my knees were hurting a lot and it was hard to get into the space to do the repair....

You might also have noticed I have not been posting much, and what I have posted is on the fluffy side. That's because I don't like to write about downer stuff much...bad enough if I am bummed out, there's no need to spread it around and bother everyone else, eh?

Lately much of my mental powers have been used up on dealing with Mike, who is Going Through a Phase. Happily I think he is well on his way OUT of the phase, with me not in jail or having to answer awkward questions for Child Protective Services or anything! So it's win-win all around.

This most recent Tool Time episode actually came about because Mike was trying to show he could be responsible. He tried to wash a load of towels all on his own. It's a task he HAS done before, but not for a while, and he seems to have turned the knob on the washer backwards a few cranks by mistake. So it was off-cycle, and when it quit, there were still a few inches of rinse water in the drum. But he soldiered on and put the ABSOLUTELY SOAKED towels into the dryer as though all was well. (Yes, and doing that DID get the floor pretty wet, too.)

We knew nothing about all this until I happened to go back towards the laundry room and heard the dryer making a new and much WORSE sound which I can't begin to approximate here. The last few staggering steps before death kind of sums it up.

Let us draw a curtain over the part where my head a splode, and move up to yesterday.

FIRST I cleared out a workspace, because as with most typical laundry rooms, ours came equipped with the invisible Stuff Magnet, which mysteriously pulls everything in the house which has no established function or storage spot into the already microscopic laundry room free space. Then I went hunting for tools. I have a gazillion tools, but the ones I need always seem to be the ones REPULSED by the rays of the Stuff Magnet, so they aren't there in the tool chest for critical functions.

I have to say, the dryer repair kit people were 100% right on the money with their instructions, which are included with the parts. It was actually not that hard to disassemble the whole dryer by following along on the sheet. When I got down to the roller assemblies which the Repair2000 guy thought were causing our problems, that turned out to be exactly it.



These two rollers were identical at birth, and the one on the bottom of the machine had held up pretty much okay. But as you can see, the one on the left, which had apparently been a LITTLE out of true, got cored out by the wet towel load and also sheared off a whole lot of its rubber, which was liberally coating the dryer wall, far too close to the electric motor for the peace of mind of my vivid imagination.

To cut to the chase, I did manage to get the rollers and belt replaced and everything stuck back together, plus on the recommendation of the web repair guy I added a much safer flexible steel dryer vent. Since they say these older dryers are actually a lot sturdier than the models available today, for about $50 and a few hours of really annoying and frustrating work, I have one that works like new and ought to be good for 5-10 years more!

And Mike had another Learning Experience.