<[email protected]> wrote: >Mike, so, how DID you redesign your dryer to fix this problem? i'd love to >do it too! please tell...
>angel Hi angel, This is a very long subject, very difficult to describe without pictures of the inside of a dryer. Basically, I had access to the junkyard of a local appliance store. I brought derelict washers and dryers over on my dolly and upstairs to my apartment. My landlord didn't like this and threatenened to evict me on several occasions, but he needed me to fix the machines in his store, laundry, and around the building, so he eventually relented. You would have absolutely no preconceived notions on how dirty these machines are, and how badly they are designed. Most washers leaked badly and made me very ill. It took a long time to recognize they were the cause of the problem and remove them. I stopped working on them because of this. I now have a nice Kenmore Elite He3T front load washer, and this is by far the very best washer I have ever seen. It had a few problems, but I took advantage of the Sears repair visits to learn how to take it apart and fix any problems that might crop up. Incidentally, if you ever get one, the reason it is so heavy is the horizontal drum is surrounded by several hundred pounds of high density concrete to absorb vibration from unbalanced loads. So if you ever have to move, be sure to insert the support bolts securely. If it happens to go off-balance and get out of control while moving, it will likely punch a hole in the stairs on the way down and end up in the basement. I kid you not. The dryers are a nightmare. I found many examples of discarded dryers that were perfectly functional and only needed a new door switch. I found the same thing with many microwave ovens that I repaired to heat my blankets to steam kill spores. That doesn't work, but I still do it for lack of a better method at the moment. The dryers are deliberately designed to spray lint everywhere inside so it block the ducts and stops working due to lack of air flow. This forces you to buy a new one. I found many examples of blocked ducts that a few minutes with a Philips screwdriver removing the front door would give immediate access so you could see the problem and fix it. I felt it was criminal that appliance salesmen know these things because they see it all the time, yet they take some poor single mother with children who cannot survive without a dryer, and make her pay inflated prices plus sales commission to sell her a new, unneeded appliance. As an engineer, I cry inside when I see these things. So I would take the dryers they junked, repair them, and give them to a local woman's shelter. They were extremely grateful. Most dryers had several inches of lint on the bottom. This is a fire hazard, and I found insurance sites that claim there are 25,000 serious fires every year due to fires started in dryers. I believe it. I would take old dryers down to the parking lot, dissasemble them, and simply scrub and flush with soap and water until they started showing signs of becoming clean. You have to take them completely apart - every nook and cranny from the mounting screws on the bottom to the decoration plate on the top front panel will be packed with lint. Don't worry about the water shorting out the motor or switches. They are designed to work in dirty environments, and as soon as the water dries, you can reassemble them and apply power. It will take all afternoon, so bring plenty of patience. There are far too many places for lint to gather to list, but I constantly fell ill, took the dryer completely apart, then found another hiding place that I missed previously. This is still going on, years after. So never give up. Some of the good hiding places are the stainless steel heat shield on the back of the drum on some models. This is visible when you open the door. It contacts the drum around the edge, and if you take it off, you will find a large ring of lint around the edge. But you have to take the drum out completely to remove the mounting screws, and it is a real pain to get everything put back together. Your arms are not long enough to reach around the dryer and hold the pieces while you insert the screws. I played with different methods to make it easier to remove the heat shield, but I eventually removed it completely and permanently. Too much work to keep it, and it works fine without it. The whole inside of the dryer is a story like that. The lint filter has a 1/4 inch gap at the back that allows lint to bypass the screen. I redesigned the filter to provide better filtering. The plastic ducts behind the front door have many nooks and crannys that store lint. This was an ongoing problem to seal for a long time. There is no good solution. You just have to take it apart after several loads and clean it completely. The blower housing and exhaust were the easiest parts. I used plain househoof GOOP to permanently mount the exhaust pipe to the plastic housing. I found and a kind of plastic bubble floor covering that goes underneath hardwood floors to provide sound isolation. It is wonderful material, withstands boiling temperatures, and glues well with GOOP. I use it to seal the blower housings. It works like magic. The last part is to use an old tire inner tube to slide over the elbow joints at the exhaust to seal them from spewing lint everywhere. I happened to have great luck - I went to a car dealer and asked the guy at the parts counter if he had any old inner tubes. Everyone else had said, sorry, we threw those out years ago. This person listened to my story, smiled, and came back carrying an old, used, dust covered inner tube that he probably had been tripping over for the last 20 years and was happy to get rid of it. It fit perfectly! So these are some of the things you might run into. My best recommendation is to find some local teenager who is good taking things apart, and get him to clean your dryer. If it is more than a couple of years old, you will not believe how the lint can build up inside, and the fire hazard it presents. I leave you with these words: Press on: nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. - Calvin Coolidge Mike Monett -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: [email protected] Address Off-Topic messages to: [email protected] The Silver List and Off Topic List archives are currently down... List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
