Another mission from Madam Secretary...
I was made aware the washing machine had started sending coded messages by thumping away under the sink. It would seem the dampers had failed. My mission, to silence the awful din this thing could make. After searching online to discover who else had fixed one of these I found that the moulding holding the dampers encircles the drum. Other than totaly dismantling the thing, it would seem drilling and using a vibrating saw to cut the pins. This I did and removed the old grease streaked dampers.
I made new damper pins once the remanents of the old ones got removed. This left me with a supposed 14mm hole for the pin body and a 9mm pilot through the other side. The pins are tested with the new damper. The first pin was tested for fit... and this is where things started to go sideways. The pin wouldn't go in, the old pins had splines on them, the remnants I measured had pretty much gnarled the splines off and the hole size in the moulding was much smaller diameter than the new damper. OK, they seem to be about 14mm, hmmm not got that size drill, or reamer. Look in the scrap box for something to make a cutter/reamer from. An old reject shaft from a model gas turbine !!! Hey, they are quality steel and run really true, just wrong size for what they were mean't for. Start turning the shaft to the 13.8mm I decided the pin could be and still be a good fit in the damper rubber.
Then move onto the mill, using the face cutter, machine some grooves into the cutter from the side to make crude flutes. Job done I now have my cutter. At this point some specialist equipment was needed, break out the Aldi right angle drill adapter. It's a pretty tight fit as I didn't want to chop the excess off the shaft in case I needed to reuse this material again. The setup made short work of opening out and reaming the holes to a tight fit for the pins I made. As I got side tracked with the reamer I didn't pay close attention to parting off both pins and one IS shorter than the other, but still long enough to do the job.
Finally time to install the pins, no way I could knock them in, so application of Vaseline to the pins and squeeze them in with my g-clamp. Clean up all the mess turn the washing machine upright and plumb it back in. Well that passed a few hours, time for Madam Secretary to test it out. About 20 mins into its cycle the bloody thing started knocking again, but not as bad as before. So much for buying her a skipping rope as my reward.... Looks like a new washing machine.
Some times it's a Mad Mod too far. I at least enjoyed making the reamer and pins. What did you do this evening ???