On Saturday evening of this past weekend, our dryer developed this rythmic banging that I traced to the rear screw of one of the fins inside the spin compartment.

I tightened it (and all of the others) down and replaced the front of dryer.

The next day we ran the dryer, it failed to stop after hours of heated drying (we were racing around trying to get things ready for company, so lost track of time). The timer dial was still where we set it.

As a test, we ran it on timed drying and that also failed to stop.

The dryer does stop when we move the dial to one of the Stop positions.

For the moment, we are setting a timer and then going to check.

So, I am wondering if I could have jostled something loose when I was in fixing the banging problem, or if the banging loosened something, or if this is just a coincidence.

Clearly, a 'yes' to any of those will require more diagnosis on my part, so I'd also appreciate some tips on that as well.

No... I don't like coincidences either... but I checked all of the connections to the timer and they were all solidly there and undamaged looking.

I'll have to take some of the panels off and see if I can trace more of the wires to make sure all of the connections inside look OK.

A couple years back, one of the connections to the heater melted, but a simple replacement kept it going to this point.

And, yes, that new timer is pricey enough (and seeing other folks have timer-related issues that a new timer did *not* fix) that we may go the new dryer route once the manual timer method gets sufficiently old.