As a faithful reader of these hallowed pages, you know that the door switch assembly and the machine control board has been the Achilles Heel on this otherwise superbly mediocre washing machine. In most of these failures, the root culprit have been the wax motor in the door switch assembly. The wax motor had a nasty habit of shorting out, which fried resistor R11 on the machine control board. The required repair was to replace both the wax motor and the machine control board for a total slam of about $250 in parts alone! Can you see now why Maytag had to sell out to Whirlpool? And the games continue…

The old wax motors had a brown plunger. If yours has this, then you should upgrade to the new wax motor which has a black plunger, shown below:

To learn more about your washing machine, or to order parts, click here.

So, you got bitten by the DIY bug and decided to replace the transmission in your Whirlpool direct drive washing machine (may have a Kenmore label on it, but same-o same-o, GI). It came out easily enough but now the blasted thing won’t set back in the machine correctly. What’s a grasshopper to do? Come, read these pearls of wisdom from Sublime Masters appl.tech.29501 and AccApp and they’ll help you get it in gear. And heed these tips from Academy Fellow Willie:

Pounding and banging or using the screws to pull transmission into place IS NOT THE WAY TO DO IT!!!!!!!!

If the transmission won’t slide up nice and smooth, right into place then you either have the brake release cam right on top of the clutch spring, or the most likely problem is that you let the basket drive/brake assembly drop down after removing the transmission.

Anytime you remove the transmission you must make sure the brakes are seated all the way up into the brake drum. You just need to turn the brake release cam and at the same time push the basket drive up as far as it will go then let the brake release cam go. The basket and basket drive/brake assembly will stay up in place if you don’t mess with the brake release cam while the transmission is out.