Appliance Repair Wisdom for the Ages

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

Awwite, all you grasshoppers, go git you a brewski and gather 'round. It's time for another one of weird ol' Uncle Samurai's war stories.

A while back, one stormy, wintry day, I got a call on a Maytag Neptune stack laundry, complaint was that the washer wouldn't spin. So, I saddled up my not-so-trusty Ford service van and rode on out into the frozen tundra to fix it.

When I got there, I verified the complaint--sho nuff, no spin. So I go through all the basic checks that you do on these machines for these types of complaints: make sure the washer's pumping out (if it ain't, it'll never spin), check the door switches and the balance sensing circuit. All checked out ok.

Now, as an astute practitioner of the repairing arts and being in the know about these things, I turned my keen, laser-like attention on the machine control board. I pulled that sucker out which, in the stack Neptune, is located upstairs in the dryer compartment, and feasted my Vulcan squinties upon it. My trained and bifocaled eyeballs were looking for any signs of the infamous burnt R11, a problem more common with these Neptunes than ticks on a hound dog. Not seeing anything unusual with R11, I was getting ready to tuck the machine control board back in when my calibrated eyeballs noticed something off-color about R43. I took a closer look and, sho nuff, it was as toasted as the Samurai on a Saturday night.

Now this was a head scratcher. See, R11 is in the spin cycle circuit and that's why it tends to burn up when there's a spin problem. But R43 is in the end-of-cycle signal circuit--ain't got nothin' to do with spin. I was confronted with what we professional appliantologists call a "connundrum." That's one o' them fancy words you learn after you been in the trade a while. Oh, they's a whole bunch of other words like that, but I can't remember 'em right now on account o' I'm too busy writing this sto-ree. Speaking of which...

Well, this was one o' them problems where I had to use what they call on CSI "dee-ductive reasoning." Oh yeah, the Samurai is fully qualified to perform all types of reasoning. For ezzample, I'm real good at coming up with reasons why Mrs. Samurai awwta go into town to git me some more beer. Anyway, what it boiled down to was that if everything else checks out ok and you see a problem on a particular component, like the machine control board, then you can dee-duce that the machine control board is bad. And so I done dee-duced it.

Now, one other thang to keep in mind. They's been so many problems with the door latch mechanism causing the machine control board to fail that it's just SOP for me that whenever I replace a Neptune machine control board, I always replace the door latch assembly at the same time--whether it needs it or not. If you don't, you stand a real good chance of burning up a brand new, mondo-expensive machine control board in short order.

Everyone loves a story with a happy ending, and this story has one, too: replacing the machine control board and the door latch assembly fixed the washer and the customer was happy...with me. They're very perturbed with Maytag, however, and will be joining that class action lawsuit.

These days, seems everyone wants a moral to the story. Well, I don't wanna dissapert y'all so this story has one, too. When working on these Neptunes, understand that the engineers were smokin' crack when they designed the electronics on this thing. Anything that goes wrong on the Neptune, from a door switch to a water valve, fries the machine control board, sometimes in peculiar and unexpected ways. Watch for it.

Awwite, story time's over. Now come git you some parts and go fix that washer.

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