Category: Fix-It-Man

Fix-It Man!

RilalyLeave a comment

I barely know what I’m doing. I write those words of caution to anyone who thinks I have some level of expertise, experience, or credentials when it comes to these Fix-It Man! articles on Do-It-Yourself (DIY) projects. The garbage disposal article, the washing machine article, and this article are/were written from the dumb guy’s perspective of fixing various things around the home. This dumb guy’s perspective has been informed by the DIY YouTube guys and some “you’re doing it wrong” friends. The “you’re doing it wrong” friends have offered me some tips on how to fix what needs fixing, and I thought some of my fellow dumb guys might appreciate me passing those tips along. It is also written from the perspective of someone who got tired of calling in the experts who charge us for every visit, regardless if they actually do nothing more than switch something on. If you’re reading this for some level of expertise, “you’re doing it wrong”.

During my 20+ years of living in apartments, and never having to fix anything myself, I heard all the talk about how to best take care of a lawn, fix and/or replace an appliance, and all the tips on how best to renovate or modernize a home. I didn’t listen. It bored me so much that I tried to change the subject, but I wish I listened a little bit, now, because I’ve now done all of the above, and it’s embarrassing how little I know.

Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning (HVAC)

Every time we called an HVAC guy in, they checked two things. They checked the air filter inside our home, on the interior portion of our HVAC unit (furnace and air conditioner), and then they checked how dirty the outside portion of our HVAC unit (the condenser) was. One rule of thumb they taught us with the air filter is to hold it up to the light. If we can see light, it should be okay. This is far from an exact science, but it gives us a better idea how dirty our filter is. Dirty is dirty, but it’s mostly a judgment call. Most HVAC guys suggest changing the air filter quarterly (every three months), and they suggest we write the date of installation on our new filter with a Sharpie to help us keep track of how often we change it. This quarterly suggestion is relative to the size of the house, how many live in the home, if you have pets, if anyone in your home has allergies, how often you use the HVAC, and the general air quality of your home. Some HVAC specialists say the rate of changing filters is so relative to all these conditions that they suggest we, at least, check it once a month, until we get a feel for how often we need to change it. I’ve found that it often depends on the season. The Fall and Spring require changing it less often, and the Summer and Winter require changing it more frequently, obviously indicating greater usage of the heating and air-conditioner. When installing a new air filter, make sure that the arrows on the filter point in the proper direction. Each filter will come equipped with an arrow on it, make sure it’s pointed in the correct direction. Make sure that arrow is pointed toward the HVAC.

Hosing down the outside portion of the HVAC unit (the condenser) requires less frequency, but that thing can get clogged. The vents get clogged with a mass of everything including pollen, grass clippings, and dirt. The fibers of the vent are called fins. As you will see if you touch the fins, as I’ve done on my unit, they’re very sensitive, and if you collapse them in anyway, air won’t get through. So, you shouldn’t wipe them down, as you’ll collapse the fins. (Quick note: There is a product called a fin comb that allows us to try to straighten out collapsed fins.) The condenser’s main job is to pull in air and cool it off, so when it “pulls,” it drags everything loose into the unit. The fins are positioned to keep as much as they can off the central unit, and as you can imagine this can cause them to become clogged. Take a hose and wash the muck off the fins at an angle that prevents the water from getting into your unit. Avoid spraying or using any degree of force with the water to prevent fin collapse. Use a low water flow at an angle, so you don’t get water in the unit, to bring all that stuff down, and water, or finger, out the bottom where all the muck collects. 

Weed, Seed, and Feed.

“How do you keep your grass so beautiful?” neighbors ask. There’s no super-secret formula, miracle cure, or homeopathic remedy here. Everyone is looking for that no labor, quick-fix that some other guy knows. I don’t know if this is nothing more than fellas standing in a lawn, with a beer in hand, conversation, or if they’re actually asking me for tips. If you go to your lawn expert store, one of the more seasoned representatives will tell you, it’s less about that high-priced ingredient and more about consistency. They’ll tell you that the secret to a successful lawn involves four things: Seeding your lawn, Weeding it, Feeding, and watering. (Some suggest that there is no such thing as over-seeding a lawn, and that the best way to prevent weeds is to seed so much and so often that you don’t leave room for the weeds to grow, and over-seeding might actually promote healthier growth. If we over-seed, they suggest, we might be able to dispense with using the weed killers.) They suggest seeding between mid-spring and mid-Summer. As for weed killer, most experts agree that spring or fall are the best time to attack weeds, as their roots are at their weakest point during these times. 

When it comes to mowing, the age-old debate is to bag or not to bag grass clippings. Most of those who appear to know what they’re talking about suggest leaving the bag off. It is messier, but it allows the grass clippings to decompose between the blades of grass and feed the grass and the soil with the nutrients from their decomposition. The two caveats here are that non-bagging it not only spreads grass clippings, it spreads weed seeds. The non-bagger also needs to watch to make sure that the clumps that can occur when mowing high grass or wet grass doesn’t cover the grass so much that it prevents your grass from getting Sun. Clumps can also suffocate grass and result in those dreaded brown patches. When it happens, I either kick small clumps around to break them up, or if there is such a large line of excess grass I go over them with a weed eater or a leaf blower.

Another related topic is dog dung, “Doesn’t it act like a fertilizer? I mean, isn’t that what fertilizer is made of?” a friend asked when he saw me picking it up. It can act as a fertilizer, if you grind it up and put it between the grass blades, but I’m guessing you’re not going to do that. When a huge clump of dog dung sits atop the grass, it acts as a huge clump of grass, blocking the Sun and suffocating the grass, leaving brown patches. The logical conclusion to this paragraph is, the secret to a successful lawn involves a lot of hard work. If you do it, you know it’s not hard, it’s never hard. It’s just constant and repetitive maintenance and routine.

It’s Clogged

Is your toilet, sink, bathtub, etc., constantly backing up on a semi-regular basis? Miracle cure here. If you attended your incredibly boring eighth-grade science fair, one of your classmates created the requisite volcano exhibit. They constructed a makeshift volcano, and to create the image of lava pouring out, they created a concoction of four parts baking soda in with two parts distilled vinegar. If they were truly ambitious, they added an orange-colored tablet to affect an orange color. This concoction, sans the orange-colored tablet, can also clear your drain. You might need a heaping amount of baking soda, four cups are often suggested, coupled with two cups of distilled vinegar. The sites also suggest topping this off with a pot of boiling water (no specific measurement). The sites usually declare this as an excellent preventative measure, but it will probably not unclog a major blockage. They suggest that a once-a-month solution might help keep everything in your drains clean and flowing.      

Fear of the Hymenoptera

If you want to see friends, grown men, run for cover, nearly knock pregnant women over, and all but squeal, yell: “BEE!” I don’t know if we base our exaggerated fears on the much-talked about bee allergies, “If a bee stings me, I could die, if I don’t have an EpiPen available.” I’m sure there’s some truth to this, but I doubt it’s as prevalent as the squealers suggest. My guess is that their hysterical reaction is mostly based on some holdover from the childhood trauma of being stung for the first time. I don’t care how scared, unmoved, or fearless you are, stings and bites hurt, particularly when we’re young. It can also be scary and shocking to learn, for the first time, how bad these stings and bites hurt. It can be so shocking that it leaves a psychological mark for which some of us never fully recover. Seeing them, rally seeing those faces for the first time, in a book or magazine, does nothing to quell our fears. Their alien faces might only add to those fears. “There’s all these things flying around my lawn, trying to sting me?” It makes us feel unsafe as kids. Add to that that every kid we know is just as afraid of them as we are, and one kid has that story about how his cousin Peter got stung by a whole mess of them, and his face swelled up like a balloon, “and he almost died!” So, when we were young and got stung, we were the talk of the town in our little kid corners. It also hurt really bad, and that pain seemed to last a couple of days, until we grew to sprinting and squealing adults who almost knocked a pregnant woman down. 

I don’t fear all of the flying things that belong to the order of insects called the Hymenoptera, including the bee, the wasp, and the hornet, but I have oodles of respect for them. That respect is also on a sliding scale that can, at the upper reaches, lead to some level of fear. If a honeybee flies near me, I’ll respectfully swoosh it. In my experience, this teaches the average honeybee that I’m not a landing spot, and they respectfully fly away. I have developed a ‘you don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you’ relationship with the honeybee that has served us both well. This holds true, for the most part with the bumblebee. In my experience, honeybees and bumblebees don’t want to sting us. If we unwittingly or not, threaten them, their nest, or their people, they’ll sting, but that is not their goal in life. My friends drive the threat level to ten on anything in a black and yellow uniform, but I don’t regard their threats as uniform. Depending on the circumstances, I regard the honeybee as a level one threat, the bumblebee a three, and the wasp and hornet a level seven threat. 

Yell, “Wasp,” and I will turn and attempt to locate. I will then swipe with greater respect and a level of caution that borders on fear. That threat level does rise when scared young children and women are in the area, of course, but other than that, I swipe respectfully, move to the other side of the room, keep my eye on them throughout, and exhale when they fly away. 

If we’re being all rational, factual, and science-y, we all have to admit that neither the hornet or the wasp want to sting a human. Read an expert, and they’ll tell us that no matter what we think of them, or what experiences we’ve had, stinging us is not their raison d’etre, or their reason for being, the modus operandi, or their goal in life. Those are the facts. It just doesn’t feel that way. I know some tough and rugged men who haven’t run in years, who will break out into a tiny sprint at the sight of a wasp or hornet. We might not share much in our ways or life, or in conversation, but we both know/think that the hornet is can be an unreasonably nasty character who is out to get us. It’s not a fact, but compared to the honeybee it sure feels that way. Wasps can be ornery little beings with little fear of the human, and hornets can be downright nasty. If you yell “Wasp!” you’ll definitely get my attention, but if you yell, “Hornet!” you won’t get squealing, or nearly knocking pregnant women down, but you’ll definitely get a greater emotional (based on childhood trauma and pain) reaction out of me. It does seem to me that they are more prone to sting people for reasons we can’t figure out.    

If I find evidence of a honeybee nest on my property, I’ll do what is necessary to inform them that this is not an adequate place for their nest. Evidence, and repetitive evidence, of wasps or hornets on my property requires immediate attention. Have you ever heard the fact that the bee, the wasp, and the hornet send out distress pheromone signals to their mates? The whole idea sounds a little terrifying to me. The process plays out like this, you try to kill a wasp that is bothering you, the wife, or the child. You harm, almost kill it, or kill it in a way that causes it to die slowly. It sends out a distress signal, and all brothers, cousins, and other extended members fly in to sting you for a severe violation of the bee, wasp, or hornet code, nest, or the threat of doing damage.  

The threat of being stung, the threat of the pheromone, and the subsequent fear of being stung a lot more, led me to try to rid my lawn of a wasp nest by trying two ingenious steps. I don’t know if we should call this a home remedy, or a miracle method of ridding your property of a wasp nest, but I tried it, and it worked. Spray the nest as thoroughly as possible and run like hell. My son watched the proceedings from the comfort of our living room window. He said he didn’t know I could run that fast. I suggest spraying in the evening when they’re all sleepy and docile. The idea that they will send out a distress pheromone signal to their mates also leads me to advise that you should probably do it on a night when you have no plans to leave your home for the rest of the evening, and you might want to announce your plans to that neighbor who is tending to her garden. I might be overreacting here, or exaggerating the extent of the abilities of the wasp, but you might want to do your best to clear the entire area of any unsuspecting, potential victims who might be blamed by the wasps before spraying anything. 

The miracle cure here, if you’re against spraying pesticides, is creating a mixture of some soapy substance (some prefer Dawn dishwashing solution) with water in a spray bottle. Make sure that that spray bottle has some distance capacity too, because you don’t want to be any closer than you have to be to spray these things. I haven’t tried this method, as I prefer the leading bee, wasp, hornet killing product from Raid that can achieve great distances. The Dawn method will not kill them instantly, but they will slowly suffocate to death. They apparently breathe through their skin and Dawn prevents them from doing so, if they are coated in it sufficiently. Beware the pheromone however, as they will send it out, and you or your neighbors are in serious threat of being stung multiple times if you’re not protected by bee protective gear, or you’re still around trying to douse them. Spray and run like hell was the method I employed on the wasp nest under the handrail on my sidewalk, and according to my son, I’m apparently still pretty fast … when fear is the accelerant. 

DIY Garbage Disposal Installation: It Ain’t Easy

RilalyLeave a comment

“I done got my ying yang broke,” I would call out to my apartment managers. “Send Scully!” 

“Why do you pay rent to an apartment complex?” my friends would ask me over the course of twenty years. “You’re just throwing money down a well.” This! This is one of the many reasons why, something breaks, call Scully. We don’t have to mow, shovel snow, or know how to fix things with Scully around the corner, and we’ll never know what we don’t know, unless we make the leap to home ownership. When I made that leap, I realized if my dad ever taught me anything about home maintenance, I forgot all of it in those twenty plus years I just called Scully.

And it’s possible that my dad did teach me some things, but I was so bored by it that I didn’t pay attention, or if I did, I forgot all about everything he said as soon as the thing was fixed. I’m still so bored by it, twelve years into the leap, that I forget everything I learn soon after fixing it. If you’re one of us, and you’re tired of paying the Scullies of the world to fix it for you, YouTube is your friend. If you don’t already know this, YouTube is loaded with Do-It-Yourselfers (DIY) who will show you how to fix everything from a leaky roof to your poopeé (as opposed to your pooper, which, to my knowledge, still requires professional consultation).

“It Ain’t Easy”

One of the reasons I recommend YouTube, is that one of the alternatives is the company’s step-by-step instruction manual. My favorite thing to do with a product’s instructional manual is to crumple it up and try to sink it in the nearest waste barrel from what I deem a three-point range. My crumpling process can garner unwanted attention, as I passionately express the bottled up rage these vague, incoherent little pamphlets have caused me over the years. I can do this now, because the Do-It-Yourselfer videos provide so much more clarity.

These DIY videos don’t just instruct us how to fix our appliances and make better homes and gardens, they show us. They show us the difference. “This is a bolt,” they say to explain that which a product’s manual assume we already know, “and this is the difference between a bolt and a washer.” If they don’t say such things, you can see the difference. They’ll hold the bolts and screws in their hands, so you can see the differences in sizes before you start screwing on and screwing up. They’ll also suggest that you might want to consider borrowing your neighbors’ tools before you start, because the “tools” the companies provide are often so basic that they’ll only make your job harder. 

One warning before you start searching for these videos, almost every DIY guy will begin their video with, “[This] is pretty easy, IF you know what you’re doing.” Okay, but if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t have clicked on your video. For those of us who don’t know what we’re doing, they’ll add, “And I’ll show you how in one-hundred and twelve simple steps.” My guess is that most DIY guys have either done this over hundred and thirteen times, or they had some handyman job where they did it frequently. We do want this level of expertise, of course, but some of the times their knowledge and expertise leads them to take some knowledge for granted. 

If you’re anything like me, and you’ve spent most of your life calling Scully, I’m not going to kid you, fixing most household items properly is hard, or at least they were/are for me. My apartment dwelling friends say, “Just submit your name to that ambitious, industrious kid’s weekslong wait list. It’s worth the wait, and the labor fees, to have someone else fix it properly for you.” 

Another annoying refrain from DIY guys is the “Anyone can do this from the comfort of their own home.” Anyone can change a garbage disposal? Have you ever lifted one of those things? Try it. Walk into a hardware store and lift one, just for giggles. I can lift a garbage disposal, and I could probably curl it over 100 times, average weight 13.4 lbs., but –and this is a huge but— the angle of the extremely tight kitchen cabinet, beneath my old-world kitchen sink, is such that I can’t put my shoulder into it. For me, holding a 13.4 lb. garbage disposal is all forearm, and although I didn’t have to lift it over 100 times, it felt like it, because of all the holding, positioning, and twisting the task requires.  

To connect a new garbage disposal, we need to lift one from a very difficult angle, position it perfectly, and twist it into a groove. “EASY? You think this is easy? DIYers around the world, do me a favor, drop the word E word from your vocabulary. As David Bowie once sang, It Ain’t Easy, at least not universally.” Some of you are probably laughing at me right now, because you think it is easy. All right, well, let’s gauge the relative term easy through another relative term, experience. How much experience have you had doing this? How much experience do you have doing that? Yeah, I can do that, and I’ve done that so often that I consider it easy. So, there’s that.    

The first step, for those of us with no experience changing a garbage disposal, is to make sure your old garbage disposal is completely done. That’s right, it might not be broken, it might just be jammed. First click the overload button to reset the unit. If that doesn’t work, make sure the disposal is plugged in and the switch is working. (If you have no experience with garbage disposals, it will benefit you to run through this basic checklist before you go out and purchase a new one.) If all that checks out, find what they call an Allen wrench. Put it into the flywheel turning hole at the bottom of the garbage disposal and turn it. Turn it two to three times. If it’s a jam, you might experience a tough turn at some point. If you make it through the tough turn, and it turns with greater ease, you’ll know it was just a jam. Turn it on. If it doesn’t work initially, repeat the process (I had to do this three times on one occasion.) If that doesn’t work, your disposal might need replacing.

flywheel

Taking an old garbage disposal unit out can be accomplished by most. I’m not going to drop the E word here, but if I can do it, I have to imagine there are ten-year-olds out there, who’ve never heard the term garbage disposal, that can remove one. Follow the DIY guy’s instructions by unscrewing all of the this and thats, disconnect the tubes, and then twist the old garbage disposal out. (Note: Be careful that you don’t crack any PVC pipes.) It’s at this point, right here, when my fellow apartment dwellers say that they would just hire some ambitious, industrious kid to do the rest. I would’ve laughed hard at that ten years ago, but I nod solemnly now. “It’s probably for the best,” I now say, “because putting a new disposal on is hard. Don’t listen to the DIYers and their E words. Not everyone can do this.” 

To install a new garbage disposal, you have to position it just so, and twist. It sounds easy, but as I said that heavy thing becomes heavier through all the trial and errors. If it weren’t so heavy, it might be easy, but it’s hard to hold up there for as long as those of us who don’t know what we’re doing to slip it into the waiting groove perfectly for that final twist. If your cabinet is as tight as mine, you might try eleven to thirteen angles before you realize that there is only one angle that will work. You might look at the top of the unit, five to seven times, and try to line it up. It Ain’t Easy.

It’s frustrating, and yet it’s so frustratingly simple that it will become so frustrating that you might reach a point where you consider it impossible. If you reach that point, it’s time to take a break. If age has taught me anything it’s that it’s okay to take breaks, and in some cases, it’s almost mandatory. We’re conditioned by parents, employers, and other authority figures to think in terms of time constraints. Time constraints also define competency and mastery of a project, “I had some problems, sure, but I got it all done in under an hour.” It’s all true, but it’s also true that if you’re as frustrated as I was, you reach a point of diminishing returns. What are you going to accomplish beyond exhausting every profane word you’ve learned from high school? If you continue, trying to achieve a respectable time frame, you’re probably going to be easily satisfied with a half-ass job just to get ‘er done, then after you calm down, you’ll go back and do it correctly.

To clear the mind and approach the project from a new perspective, I suggest taking two breaks. Watch an episode of your favorite comedy in the first one. It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, show, or podcast. You need to get yourself laughing. In the second break, one that occurs after another thirty minutes of frustration, try punching a punching bag for thirteen minutes. After thirteen minutes of picturing that DIY guy’s face on your punching bag, coupled with attaching some offensive terms to his “Easy” assessments, you should be able to approach this project with a clear mind.

If you take nothing from what I’ve written thus far, remember these two words: The Plug. All garbage disposals come with a plug. The manufacturers add a plug on every the garbage disposal, because some under-the-sink systems (sink, garbage disposal unit, and dishwasher) have the garbage disposal connect to a dishwasher. Some kitchen systems allow dishwashers to connect to the waterline independently. You will need to determine which system you have before installing the garbage disposal. Before removing the old garbage disposal take note of how your under-the-sink system is set up. If the dishwasher connects to the garbage disposal, and you didn’t know anything about the plug, your dishwasher will flood. 

The DIY guy I watched probably covered this, but some of them fellers talk so much that they remind me of my eighth grade teacher. My eyes glaze over, I miss critical information, and I dismiss some of their instructions as blather. Regardless how I missed the information, I knew nothing about the plug, so I installed the garbage disposal with it still attached. When our dishwasher began flooding, we ripped that appliance apart and cleaned every single element on it. We were so confused, until I retraced my steps and realized that all of our dishwasher problems started soon after I installed the new garbage disposal. I turned to my DIY guys, and surprise, surprise, they taught me about The Plug.

If you failed to remove The Plug the first time through, it turns out that you have to undo everything you’ve done. All that frustration that led you to the most comprehensive spiritual experience you’ve ever had, that included forsaking your creator and welcoming him back into your life, was for naught. If you forgot to remove the plug, you’ll have to take the garbage disposal off, grab a screwdriver, and hammer the (expletive deleted) plug out. That sentence was so easy to write, and it was probably just as easy to read. Take it off and put it on again, it’s easy, a trained marsupial could probably do it after they’ve already done it. The reality of removing the garbage disposal, watching the DIY video guy again, taking two breaks, punching him in the mouth for thirteen more minutes, and watching my favorite comedy was as exhausting as the first time through. 

The first thing I think, soon after I’m done, is some people love this. They love getting their hands dirty, doing it themselves, and they love it so much that they invent new projects for the ostensible purpose of updating, modernizing, and renovating. “I think my ceiling fan needs some updating.” Your old one still works. “I know, but it’s so old world.” You can see it on their face, and in the songs they sing while doing it, they love this stuff, and I just sit back shaking my head, asking myself: ‘Why? For God’s sakes why?’

“I’m smart, not like everyone thinks, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect.” I’m not as dumb as I look. I can do things, other things that other people can’t. Some of the things I do are considered hard, very hard to some, but I can accomplish them with ease. I might occasionally, and accidentally, betray some level of arrogance with a look, some sort of unintended feel, or a couple of words, but whenever I start to get all full of myself,  all I have to do is try to fix something in my home that everyone considers so easy to realize that I’m not half as smart as I thought I’d be at this age.   

The Master Reset on Washing Machines

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Our washing machine stopped spinning. It would reach the spin cycle and just stop, until the spin cycle ended. I went to the phone for answers. I thought the YouTube videos on the subject would instruct me on the “simple task” of tearing the machine down to the bolts and building it back up again. I also thought they might instruct me to “simply” remove a belt that is almost impossible for someone like me to remove. I pictured an afternoon of frustration and feelings of uselessness, as I attempted to fix something way above my pay grade.
The first internet page I pulled up instructed me to perform what they called a Master Reset as the first step. A master reset? 
It sounded complicated. I read the instructions of the Master Reset: “To perform a Master Reset, carefully unplug the washing machine from the power outlet and leave it unplugged for one minute. After one minute is up, plug the washer cord back into the wall. Next, open and close the door of the washing machine 6 times within 12 seconds to send a “reset” signal to all the components.” I read through the steps a couple of times. It seemed too simple, and I knew that a remedy this simple would not work for someone like me. My cynicism led me to believe that corporations build machines like these to keep people like me from fixing them, and to keep the whole industry that surrounds washing machines, and repairmen afloat. I also thought this sounded like one of those “home remedies” that people spread via word of mouth, but no one uses, because they don’t work for “me”, and such solutions only leave those of us who are not able to fix anything with this inept feeling of being one of the few for whom miracle cures never work.
In my mind, I was already at the furniture store writing the check for a new washing machine, but I considered the idea of trying the step-by-step process of the master reset on a ‘what the heck’ basis. I thought this option might have a better chance of working than stabbing myself in the eye, so I tried it, and it … it worked. It worked so well that we did it twice just to convince ourselves that it actually worked.
I went back to the website that said, “This is a common fix that many appliance repair mechanics use – it works on about 50% of all washing machines.” The question I now have is how many times has an appliance repairman removed the back panel on our washing machine to perform what they call “a diagnostic check” on our machine while we are in the room? How many of them fiddled with the particulars of that machine, until we left that room? How many of them then executed the steps of this master reset and called us back into the room to show us their mastery, and a bill of $130 for parts and labor?

“You just needed a new flux capacitor, and well, I happened to have one on me,” they say to our amazement.

How many of us were so relieved that our old washing machine now works, and that we do not have to pay $300 for a new one, that we never questioned it? Who cares how they fixed it, as long as it works now. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars have passed from desperate customers to appliance repair mechanics over the years and decades in which this master reset option has been available to all? How many new washing machines have desperate customers purchased to replace a washing machine that most people, salesmen or not, will tell you are cheaper to replace than fix? How many of those same washing machines just used the master reset? This led me to two conclusions, I could either become an appliance repairman that specializes in fixing washing machines, and fix 50% of them, or I could spread the word and hopefully prevent others from being duped by repairmen and salespeople who tell their customers it is in their best interests, over the long haul, to just buy a new one.

[Update: Needless to say, our washing machine was on its last legs. The method described above did not fix this washing machine, or save it long-term, but it did extend the life of the machine by about a year and a half-to-two years. So, read this article for what it is and nothing more.] 

NEXT UP: How to change your Garbage Disposal, DIY-style.