More Dryer Trouble!
It’s been barely four months since I “fixed” our dryer, even though I was fairly sure it was not a permanent fix… I was still disappointed yesterday morning when we noticed it making a horrific squeal, the telltale noises of a bearing gone wrong. At first I rang the local mobile repair guy who’s pretty highly rated, but he didn’t get back to me (not sure if he’s on holidays or what). So today after work I popped the back off it, cracked into it, and sure enough one of the bearings (the front one, which kept marching out of it’s hidey-hole previously) is very chunky inside when spinning it by hand.
These look like standard bearings (in fact they look exactly like the ones used in vacuum cleaners?), so into Wimmera Bearings to get some newies to get me out of the woods today. A$8 each or thereabouts, but also while I was looking at it I noticed a suspicious ring on the dust cover where it looks like something has rubbed on it. That’s not supposed to be there, and likely explains why the thing has died prematurely, so a hypothesis began forming.
The outer bearing shell on both bearings (front and back) sit in a plastic housing, not held in particularly well in any direction except the permiter (so they’re not really retained front-to-back at all). The bearings are located front to back by the pulley pressing against the inner bearing shell, a shim between the inner bearing shells of both bearings, and then the squirrel-cage fan is supposed to be pressing against the front inner shell, which holds everything together against the center shim (I would post exploded diagrams, but there aren’t any - the Fisher and Paykel docco is missing components on it).
That’s the plan anyway, but when I look at the rear of the fan on mine, it doesn’t look like any of the photos of new spare parts… it actually looks like a piece is missing. Indeed there’s a telltale wear mark that looks suspiciously like a mirror image of the marks on the front bearing?
So I bought a small M8 washer to act as a shim to hopefully get the fan away from the bearing dust cover and let us continue to use the dryer, but I think the “real” solution is to buy a new bearing housing (so I have the proper F+P bearings, in the event that they’re not just standard) and a new fan, because I’m fairly sure that the one that I have is in some way deformed and that’s what’s been bothering the bearings.
So now we’ll see how it goes ordering parts from F+P, and hopefully we’re nearly at the end of this saga.
