My mother-in-law's 18-inch Frigidaire dishwasher stopped spraying water at all and when it is turned on, the motor can clearly be heard turning but with a sort of rasping sound. I took apart every assembly from inside of the dishwasher and could find no major damage, but the spray arm has melted plastic on one end. I figured I'd have to pick up a new motor assembly for her at that point, but they are not cheap and neither of us has the spare cash.
After another month or so, I realized that I had not removed the pump motor to see if anything was obviously wrong with it, though everything looked okay from the bottom with it installed. Upon removing the motor assembly, I found that the motor spins perfectly but that the plastic part that mates the motor shaft to the pump mechanism had broken at the base of the plastic mating shaft, just above the round, finned part of it. The spray arm must have gotten stuck on the heating element, which caused both the melting on the end as well as the plastic part to break. The part was easily removable, so I am now trying to find out what that mating part is called so that I can try to find it online (or anywhere else for that matter!) since it should be much less expensive than the entire motor assembly. The fins are right above the motor itself, facing down toward the motor, so my guess is that it is the cooling fan, but I can only find one other reference to this model's motor fan and it is on another forum and the responses say (yet again) that the whole assembly is only sold as a complete kit.
The AppliancePartsPros pump motor diagram page is
here, with the motor assembly listed as F18,
Part number: AP3885612 
There is no breakdown of this part and my searching so far has only found people saying that it is only sold as the entire kit, but I have no idea when my mother-in-law will be able to afford it, so I'm desperately trying to find out if there is a part number for the plastic shaft mating shown at the top of the motor in the first diagram I linked to above.
If there is no way to order that separately, can anyone think of a way to "jury-rig" it long enough to use the dishwasher until the motor assembly can be ordered and replaced? The high RPMs of the motor and the amount of force that is most likely required to send the water shooting through the spray arm is high enough that I doubt the ability of duct tape to come to the rescue (you don't hear that too often!). Since the bottom of the part seems to act as the motor's fan, I need to have both the two separate pieces joined together again so that the motor doesn't burn out.
07-10-2010, 04:01 PM
Pump motor shaft part
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