// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Whirlpool Washer Transmission Repair (2007)
A few months ago our whirlpool washer wouldn’t spin. It did everything else, but it was pretty worthless without the spin function because the clothes would just be sitting at the bottom of it completely soaked after a wash. Of course, the first thing I did was go to Google and type in “Whirlpool washer won’t spin” and got a lot of hits on some great websites. Most of them were repair websites and forums sponsored by kind individuals who freely share their knowledge such as fixitnow.com. Others are sponsored by companies who sell parts to DIY homeowners, like repairclinic.com.
The forums always suggest the most common and easy fixes first, like the lid switch, which wasn’t my problem. So I had to start disassembling the washer because the next item on the list was the coupling on the motor. Fortunately, these websites have directions on how to get the washer open, which takes very little effort, as long as you know which screws to remove and in what order. I knew that the coupling was unlikely to be the failed item because the agitator was still working and it would be unlikely that a failed coupling would allow that to work. Then I started looking at the clutch/brake mechanism and that also looked OK. Finally, I figured it had to be the transmission, one of the hardest items to remove. I had the entire washer torn apart and moved to the kitchen because our laundry room is more of an alcove in the entryway between the garage and the kitchen.
After pulling the transmission, I was faced with the prospect of taking it apart, knowing it would be filled with heavy oil.
To pull your washer’s transmission, you need to remove a bolt at the top of the shaft holding it to the agitator. To expose that bolt, you have to pull off the plastic cap on the top of agitator as well as another translucent seal below it. Note the translucent cap has an o-ring seal on it. Make sure to put it back in properly when you re-assemble the washer to keep water out of that bolt’s compartment or it will rust and fuse with the shaft.
I carefully took out all the screws holding on the transmission’s top cover and drained the oil into a jar. This was going to a really messy job and so I put on some vinyl mechanics gloves.
I was amazed at the complexity of the transmission. It has to perform several functions, all without any input other than the direction the motor. For instance, it has to agitate, spin, and also go into neutral without any shifters or solenoids. The same motor is simultaneously running the pump from a portion of the drive shaft that comes out the other end. The transmission uses a rather complex plate of pawls, gears, and cams on something called the ‘rack retainer’. I was trying to simulate spinning the motor forward and backward and thus I could shift it from spin mode to agitate mode, but I couldn’t get it into spin. It was then that I realized that something called a ‘shoulder pawl stud’ was broken off at its threads and the rack retainer was spinning freely. This pawl stud works as an axle and also as a way of getting the plate to spin along with the spin gear, but it was broken with its threads embedded in the main gear. So I had to find a new pawl stud and figure out a way to extract the threads from the hole they were in. I was pretty sure that the threads had some locking compound on them and they weren’t going to come out easily.
The pawl stud wasn’t available as a separate part, but there was something called the Neutral Drain Pack from Repairclinic.com which included a lot of parts, including 2 different studs, since Whirlpool evidently beefed up the threads for the newer models, no doubt because it was a weak point. The upside to that is that if I ruined the threads extracting the broken stud, I could drill and tap it for the larger stud and newer rack retainer. So as my wife headed off to the laundry mat with a load of wash, I order the parts on line. The neutral drain kit was about $17 + $6