Hello, and thanks in advance,

I've been having a problem with the door cams on my Kenmore Elite Coldspot refrigerator. Here are the refrigerator specs:

Model: 106.50502990
Serial: SK0851189
Mfg Date: 2000.03
Type: C25SSA00

This fridge came with the house when I bought it. It is a side by side, and the freezer door closes fine, but the refrigerator door started to need a bit of an extra push to close it. I did some research, found that I needed new door cams. Ordered a new upper and lower door cam, watched a video on how to replace them, but when I put the new parts on, I noticed that when the door was shut, the cams did not line up correctly. Looked at the freezer side, they line up perfectly, so I can see how they are supposed to line up.

Took the door off and looked at any and all possible ways to adjust the cams, there are none. This was about a year ago, and now a year later the bottom cam is worn down smooth, and I'm right back where I started. Started from scratch, got new upper and lower cams, installed them, and...same exact problem, they do not line up.

Checked again to see if there is any way to adjust the cams so they fit together correctly, there is no way to adjust them. The only conclusion I can come up with is that I got the wrong cams, but I quadruple checked this time before ordering them. Here are the part numbers I went with:

Upper door closing cam: Mfg # WP2182179
Lower door closing cam: Mfg # WPW10329686

I've searched every way I can think of, and these are the part numbers that keep coming up for my refrigerator model. I've spent countless hours searching for anyone else who has had the same problem, found only one person complaining about the same thing, and the answer he got was to "adjust the top hinge to a-line (sic) the closers". It is for a different refrigerator, mine does not have a way to adjust the top hinge.

Searching for this problem on forums is hard to do, because most forums will not do a search for words of 3 letters or less, so searching for "door cam" only searches for the word "door", and I get thousands of results.

So, I'd appreciate any and all help with this problem. It's not a huge expense, I can get both cams for under $10, but I don't think I should be having to replace them every year. Also, when they get worn down, the refrigerator door ends up being left open, sometimes over night, and I'd rather not have that happen.

Gene,

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I watched several videos before doing this, and now I've done it so many times (trying to figure out ways to get it to work right) I can do it in record time. Each cam has three "hills" and three "valleys". On the freezer side, when the door is closed the cams fit together perfectly, on the refrigerator side, they don't come together. After a year, when I took the door off to replace the cams, the bottom one was ground down to dust, it is completely flat, and the powdered plastic looked like the black stuff in a toner cartridge.

There's definitely something weird going on with this, I can't be the only person who has ever had this refrigerator and also had this problem, but I just can't find a solution for it.

Anyway, thanks again for the help, this isn't a huge deal, just a pain in the neck that's only slightly driving me crazy. It would be nice to figure it out though.

Got the door fixed, you can close this thread.

I had a suggestion in another forum to try the bottom cam without the screw in it to see where it lined up. I took the screw out of the bottom cam so it could move, put the door back on, and then marked where the cam was with a sharpie. Took the door back off, set the cam back in the sharpie mark, and it was about a quarter inch off of where it was with the screw in. Used a dremel tool to extend the screw hole in the cam a bit, then had to flatten the area where the screw head would go down, put it all back together, and the cams meshed perfectly.

My conclusion is there is some kind of mistake in some database somewhere that has propigated to all the parts resellers that I was able to find online. There's really no wiggle room with either cam, the way they are designed, they fit in one way, the screw locks them into place. If I weren't at least a little handy with tools, I would have had to give up, there's no way I could have gotten it to fit.