Maybe...Maybe...?

     The whole "I have thwacked my shin" saga began with me trying to do laundry and the drive belt in the dryer breaking.  It's been an ongoing part of the process.

     Consumer goods fret me.  The stuff I work on for a living is expected to run 24/7/365 with minimal downtime.  It's often more than a little overbuilt and it's not uncommon to find gadgets that are over a half-century old and still in operating condition.  Documentation is usually extensive, detailed and supplied with the equipment.  Consumer stuff is built to a price; it's as sturdy as it needs to be, but no more.  Bend the wrong thing and you can be a long time putting it right.  Service information is spotty, and frequently "universal," covering several variations and counting on your ability to figure out which one applies.  So I go into it worrying.  It's not my milieu and I will hire professionals when I think I'm getting in over my head.  The people who work on this kind of stuff all day every day can do a much better job of it than I can.

     But hey, this was just a broken belt, right?  Once I had the new belt and installed it, I managed to get a couple of loads of laundry done, but the dryer was running rough.  It was shaking and shivering enough that it knocked the duct loose.  By then, I had replacement rollers, a pair of rubber-tire wheels that support the drum at the back, and so I decided to install them.  The online videos that I found made it look pretty straightforward, pull the drum, take off the E-clips holding the old rollers, pull the wheels and a couple of washers, remove the spindle assemblies (little axles fastened to a base that is held in place by two screws), then install the new parts in opposite order and set the drum back in place, thread the drive belt and close up the dryer.  Fiddly but doable.

     First problem: with the bruised leg, I wasn't very mobile.  But hey, okay, I'd work carefully and take my time.

     Second problem: I didn't have much energy.  I made my first try on a work night and had to abandon the effort with the dryer pulled away from the wall and opened up, the belt unthreaded and the drum removed.

     Third problem, seeing doctors about the leg issue.  That took time and energy.

     Fourth problem: Once I got back on the job, I swapped out the roller assemblies -- and the drum would not go back into place.  It just would not fit.  I tried three times.  It hadn't been that hard to remove!  What was I doing wrong?  I looked at the videos, found some others, and the pros were just setting the drum back in like it was nothing.  I gave it another try.  No dice.  By then I was pretty tired.  I posed the question in an online forum and went to bed.

     The next morning, I had the online writer's group -- an hour of manuscript critiquing with a few people, an hour's break, and then the general meeting with an interesting speaker for a couple of hours.  I napped after that, checked the online forum -- no replies -- and went downstairs.  What was I missing?  I'd left the drum sitting in the dryer and I looked it over: the off-center dark mark around it from the belt, and, near the back, the tan mark from--

     What was that from?  I'd been digging around in the dryer for several days by that point, and had looked over drawings and watched videos, and there's nothing, nothing that bears on the drum at that point.  The rollers run in a little gutter at the very back, where the diameter is stepped down, with a similar section at the front, both pressing against a felt seal, and there's a simple curved support at...  At the...  Front.

     Yes, I'd spent a day trying to install the drum backwards.  The front and rear openings are not the same diameter.  The tan mark should have been at the front, where the simple support carries the drum.  I had taken the drum out, turned it ninety degrees and set it down on a laundry basket and then, the next day, lifted it, turned it ninety degrees more and set it in place backwards, confident everything was a-okay.

     Every trade has its tricks, but they all have one in common: pay attention to what you are doing and put things back together the same way they came out.  I hadn't.

     After cleaning the little gutter with rubbing alcohol, Q-tips, paper toweling and elbow grease (there was a lot of lumpy residue stuck in it from the old rubber tires), I lifted the drum out the front of the dryer, turned it one hundred eighty degrees, and it set right back in place nice as could be, supported by the new rollers and up against the rear seal.  I rethreaded the belt, lined up the front of the dryer, fastened it back into place, and lowered the lid onto its clips.  The drum turned smoothly by hand.

     That was late last night.  I went upstairs and made dinner, realized I had misplaced my work gloves, and spent an anxious several minutes thinking I was going to have to open up the dryer again before discovering I had put them on top of a small shop vacuum cleaner.

     This morning, with Tam looking on, I hooked up the exhaust duct (with a new elbow to move it away from the power cord -- I've been disliking that for years) and gave it a test run, without heat and then with heat.  So far, so good.  I've run one load of laundry through it and there's another one tumbling as I type.

     Maybe it's fixed.  We'll see.