Hey, Dick
I finished the rebuild over the weekend but hadn't been online until today. The machine is working great. It easily passed the Quick Spin diagnostic test as well as the Quick Service Cycle test with flying colors. The broken spinner bolts and the delay in getting parts due to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend made the project longer than I or, more importantly, my wife would have liked. That being said, it was back up and running in less than 2 weeks which isn't bad considering all of the delays. The washer has been working overtime to catch up on the piles of laundry and its working great. My wife has commented about how much quieter it is now. Those bearings must have really been grinding toward the end.
Below are some notes and a few pictures from the tear-down and rebuild. Hopefully they will come in useful to others in the future.
Once I removed the transmission, it was clear that the tranny O-ring seal had failed. The first picture shows the water/corrosion/rust within the spinner support shaft. This area should be dry and free of moisture.
I used an improvised spinner nut removal method since I didn’t have the custom tool mentioned in the service manual. As shown in the second picture, I used a well sized socket placed in the clutch pulley upper bearing coupler slot to prevent the spinner nut from rotating. With a crescent wrench and cheater bar (old 3’ piece of 1” aluminum tubing) I turned the spinner support shaft to loosen the nut. This method worked well but see my lessons learned note below.
The third picture shows the outer tub seal after I removed the spinner support shaft. There is clearly moisture beyond this seal as well. Rust is visible on the top of the outer tub upper bearing. Interestingly none of these bearing are the reason the machine stopped working. The two outer tub bearings and the two spinner shaft bearings were still operational although they have clearly been damaged by both the tranny O-ring and outer tub seal leaks. It was a matter of time before these bearings failed as well. The cause of my failure symptom was that these leaks made their way down to the two one-way clutch pulley bearings which had seized up preventing the tub from turning during the spin cycle. I point this out because if I had decided to get the unit back in service by just replacing the clutch pulley assembly, I would be tearing it apart again to fix the real cause once the other bearings finally failed.
The next few photos show the corrosion on the spinner support as well as rust on the agitator shaft. All four of the bearings showed some sign of rust. I cracked open one of the larger outer tub bearings. As you can see from the photo, the teal-blue grease is still present but there is also rust beginning to form inside of the bearing. This teal-blue grease is what Dick initially noticed in an early photo I took of the spinner nut after I removed the clutch pulley.
Next was the cleanup. I let the spinner support dry over night and then used a wire brush drill attachment to remove 95% of the corrosion. The next two photos show the areas of most concern which are the two areas where the water-tight seals are supposed to be made. On the top size, it is the groove where the tranny O-ring sits and on the bottom side, it is the fillet and shaft where the tub seal and sleeve mate. In these locations I used a wire brush attachment on a rotary Dremel tool to remove the rest. The rotary tool did a great job of cleaning those interfaces and the fine wires of the attachment actually polished the surface pretty well. Once clean, it was clear that there was significant pitting in the aluminum of the spinner support shaft fillet area. This appears like it was from the original casting tool. I wonder if this is part of the reason for the tub seal failure. A worn casting tool may have compromised these seals on a lot of these machines.
After seating the new bearings, I applied the recommended waterproof lithium grease to the spinner support fillet at tub seal mating area. On the outer tub side of the mating interface, I took the recommendation of a few earlier posters who recommended using Vaseline to improve the water tightness of the interface. I also applied Vaseline to the O-ring groove of the spinner support and it’s mating surface underneath the transmission.
Final reassembly of the outer tub and spinner support through the clutch pulley and tumblers took only about an hour. I plugged it in, ran the Quick Spin diagnostic test and it ran flawlessly. It quietly reached its max RPM of 850 with an empty tub and very little wobble. Mission accomplished!
I did note a few lessons learned from the project:
- An impact wrench really did the trick on the spinner bolts. Even though two of them broke, with the amount of corrosion I had, it was really the only way to get them out. The right tools make all the difference.
- I initially ordered the wrong O-ring. The correct OEM part number for the tranny O-ring is 25001105. I incorrectly ordered another O-ring that shows up on the part list. The parts diagrams show the one I ordered by mistake goes between the clutch pulley and the outer tub but this may be specific to a later Series. My Series 10 machine does not use this part. Bottom line, in the earlier posts I have an incorrect part number for this O-ring. I’ll try to go back and fix it in the earlier posts.
- If you are going to improvise and use the spinner nut removal method shown in the picture, remember that you are holding the nut stationary and actually turn the spinner support shaft. This means that you should be turning the spinner support shaft CW to loosen the nut. I realized that after trying to turn it the wrong direction and I dinged up the edges where the clutch pulley’s spinner shaft coupler mates. I was able to fix the dings with a few passes from a metal file.
- The bearing seats will not stop at exactly the right depth so as you get close to having the second bearing fully seated, pay attention that you do not compress the spacer such that it is difficult to get it centered. I did this and it made for some extra work to get the spacer centered with the two outer tub bearings.
Dick, thanks for all your help and encouragement. I consider myself relatively handy but some of this stuff was new to me. Your instructions made the process as smooth as possible.
Rob
robksu attached the following image(s):
