A New Holiday Tradition
It looks like I will be spending Christmas Eve locating and replacing the belt on my Mother’s clothes dryer, or, possibly stringing and using a clothes line, which is not a great idea in an area with a concentration of doves and seagulls that perch in the overhanging trees.
There are only two places that are likely to have the part locally, and, at this time of year, it is highly unlikely that if it is not available locally I can get it in less than a week.
The joys of life in a small town.
Update: We have rotation, and an actual, real, made in the USA replacement part. $19 for 92 inches of a ¼” wide strip of fibers coated in rubber, but it works and went on as advertised.
7 comments
…believe me, I feel your pain. In fact, I’m a bit jealous that you have two places to go to. A primary solace that I find in my small town existence is that I finally gained access to “high speed” internet last August, so that I have certain alternatives to look for things like dryer belts and heating elements and washer transmissions and dishwasher control valves and burner units for camp trailer refrigerators that don’t leave me totally at the mercy of somebody at the other end of a phone line or Steve down at the local hardware/appliance store…
The local United Parcel Service folks and I have come to be on a first-name basis. That apparently is a perk of being a reliable “next day air” customer…
The only reason I have two places is that the dryer is sold under many different names. If I hadn’t discovered that in the ‘Net I would have no places to go as my Mother bought the dryer from a military family who discovered that natural gas wasn’t available to the house they rented after they arrived. It is a Whirlpool “store” brand, like Kenmore, and the brand has never been sold locally.
I have a Whirlpool part number for one place, and a Kenmore number for the other. Fortunately the design has stayed the same, so the belts should still be available.
Based on experience, if they have it, it will be cheaper than cost plus shipping and handling, but not much. I just hope they didn’t close for Christmas week, as some local places do.
This is the sort of situation where you find yourself suddenly in possession of two baskets of wet clothes with the imperative, “dry them in your dryer for me.” Heh.
– Badtux the Dry Penguin
that’s what friends are for!
That is already been lined up, Badtux, although the offer of a fruit cake in exchange was turned down.
It was either friends, Hipparchia, or the Vietnamese laundromat at a buck to get them dry.
I am glad for your sake that it didn’t take all day!!!! That would be MY luck….
Fortunately I was able to track down all of the information needed to do the job on the ‘Net, so I knew what tools I would need, and how to pull things apart and put them back together.
This dryer was built at a time when it was expected that it would be worked on, in place, so the entire thing only involved 4 screws.
The last time my Mother looked at a new one I noticed that if anything broke, you would have to pull the beast out to get at the screws that held the cover on. That is not a good idea in my Mother’s laundry room, as you would have to remove the washer before the dryer can be moved. That would have been an all day operation.