I'll gladly take the parts list, but I'll be darned if I'm going to follow a printed troubleshooting guide, when I can make a perfectly fine mess of things all on my own...
Kinda crafty how they leave the instructions for the service folks while hiding them from the owner. Apparently they were counting on the revenue flow from service calls. Thanks a lot.
. . . and as a servicer and service trainer, I'll have to suggest that it isn't hidden from the owner so much as it is there for the servicer so he doesn't have to carry a ton of manuals to hope he has the right one when he gets to your house. And given the issues of liability and safety, most people don't need to be opening their appliances anyway. Sure, there are many competent do-it-yourselfers out here (and I like to think I am one of them) but I just repaired a dryer for a friend whose husband tried to change the pigtail himself. He had the tools, but he really should have unplugged it first. As we tell people, just because the appliance is off doesn't mean the appliance is dead, and just because it appears to be dead doesn't mean there isn't power . . . somewhere.
I have (had) appliances from all three companies, yet never found a guide taped to the inside. Monkeys can't even get that right.
I disagree about the absolute minimum fastener count. Several clothes washers and dryers could have used a few more to prevent their panels from rattling. When I have to wedge paper wads between panels to stop the rattle, the designers didn't use enough fasteners.
Then again, a machine that didn't vibrate so much wouldn't need so many fasteners.
The internet has opened the world to the DIY repair engineer. If it breaks or gives a fault code on your appliance, there is a good chance that it has done the same for someone else. A quick internet search of the make, model, and problem usually yields enough information for educated troubleshooting to take place.
You're right about that, Tim. Many of those who send the Made by Monkeys stories to this blog include tales of going to the Internet when their product fails. Invariably, the problem they're encountering is described in spades by fellow consumers who have faced the same failures. Often -- but not often enough -- solutions are also discussed.
When choosing to become a DIY engineer and tear into an appliance, machine, or electric device one should always be careful to understand the warranty. Quite often opening and removing panels can void any warranty benefits that were available.
Greg, I agree. Appliances would make excellent tear-down engineering student examples. Good, robust design techniques combined with planned end-of-life component engineering. I can imagine an college engineering lab continuously running a washer or dryer for the students to predict when bearings or other components will wear out.
The service information is included because many times the service person is a contractor from some other service compay who is just called to do a warranty repair. They may have never seen this appliance before, and may not be at all familiar with it. As for the warrantys, mostly I have had things fail just after the warranty runs out. That takes a bit of design skill. But a refrigerator is not the latest audio device, and the older ones would last for 15 years as a minimum, and then the first item to wear out might be a drawer slide or a door hinge. Now the items to fail are the defrost timer that they get for $3 and sell for $55.
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