… and my clothes cleaned. Or more importantly, dried.

Before I was a programmer I worked for my dad in construction over the summers of high school. It was good solid work. I enjoy working with my hands at times. For one thing, you see and feel the results of your accomplishments in a very tangible manner. For another, you generally can measure the impact of your effort.

After my dad died, I wrote about using a drill of his to work on the addition that was to become my office. I liked the heft and feel of it. I knew I was accomplishing something with it. Being a programmer, sometimes it’s hard to experience that. Currently for example I’m working on an ETL script using PowerShell to SFTP down a file, extract it to some tables and then feed it into Salesforce. For me, it’s just a bunch of data. Yeah, there’s some fun challenges; learning how to setup and deal with GPG and designing a robust and secure information because some of the data is sensitive. But, once the project is finished, it’ll run silently and other than an occasional email, I won’t think much about it. It won’t impact my day to day life in any way and I won’t be able to point to it and say, “See, THERE is something I did.”

But, my dryer on the other hand, now that’s different. For awhile now (say at least a year or two) whenever I’ve run a load it’s made a fearsome rumbling sound. It’s been annoying, but we’ve managed to live with it up until 6 or 7 weeks ago. Generally I’d do most of the laundry on Sundays and if there was a load or two left, on Monday while everyone else was out of the house or at school. But obviously things changed. My wife’s office is in the room next to the laundry room. Whereas for me the rumbling was faint and simply background noise, for her it was quite noticeable.  I tried to work the loads around her work schedule, especially since she’s on so many conference calls for her job, but it was getting less and less practical.

It was finally time for me to do something about it. Now, had I been smart, I’d have started the project on a Monday. But, I’m not always that smart. So, Saturday came around and I disassembled the dryer.

I was fairly confident I knew what the problem was. I assumed that either something had wrapped around one of the rollers for the drum, or a bearing in a roller had seized. If it was the former, the fix would be trivial and I’d have the whole thing back together before dinner. If it was the latter, I figured a shot of silicone or other lubricant and I could at least get a few more weeks out of it while I ordered the parts. And since the tight screws were now loosened and I knew how to take it apart, the final fix would go quickly.

Well, as they say, you know what happens when one assumes. I was wrong about the first guess, it was not something as simple as something wrapped around the roller. And I was even more wrong about it being a seized or flattened bearing. See for that assumption to be valid the bearing assembly inside the wheel has to actually exist.

Bearing Assembly? What Bearing Assembly?

It’s a bit hard to make out, but inside the blue part of the wheel above, and behind the plastic triangle, there is supposed to be a nice little bearing assembly.  There is none.

Better view of the roller

You can see the wear on the inner hub.  This is what in the trade is called “less than optimal.”

More seriously though, it unfortunately meant that this was not going to be a quick fix. I had been planning on ordering the parts, but this made it a bit more of a rush. The dryer contains four of these rollers and as such I ordered a four pack, since generally my assumption on items like this is is that if one has worn, all four are worn. Now, none of the other three have shown nearly the damage, but figure, I’m in there, I might as well make it right.

What’s most interesting to me, is that there’s literally NO sign of the roller assembly in the dryer. However it got destroyed, it was pretty cataclysmic.

I also took the time to clean out the rest of the interior space and correctly deduced that the moisture sensor was covered with lint. Now that I know where it is, I can keep that clean in the future.

In any case, sometime later this week, I’ll get my package, swap out the rollers and reassemble the dryer and start doing laundry again. Quietly.

But, unlike the ETL I’m writing above, this change will have a direct noticeable impact on my life I’ll be aware of every time I do a load of clothes. I like that.

This week’s takeaway? I do enjoy my job and the challenges that come with it, but there’s something to be said for doing work you can touch and feel and experience the tangible impact.

My best sourdough yet!

And perhaps I shouldn’t be posting pictures of homemade bread after talking about dirty hands. Don’t worry, I washed my hands!