My first response was to get it repaired. This is not something you do lightly in Ballarat in the first couple of months of the calendar year. Places close, some close down, and what remains open has a waiting list so long it’s the envy of the public hospital system.
Buying a new one seemed to be option 2. This has the advantage that places who want to sell you things are nearly always open, even in Ballarat. I priced out a few dryers: the best option I found was a Westinghouse at $549 For a dryer? Good God, they’re only a fan, an element and a motor type thing to turn the drum! But they’re whitegoods, the shops can’t sell one every day, so they make them expensive to cover their lack of profit in the months when the poor buyer isn’t buying a new one.
But what did I think was going to thappen? Of course dryers are that expenisve at The Good Guys – Leading Appliance & Entertainment. Retailer These were the guys who’d try to sell me a one cup sized coffee pod machine for $200. But where else was I going to go? Betta Electric and Allwares have both closed their shops here, so here I was…$549 for a new dryer. Or wait till the middle of February to have someone come around and have a look at my current one for $160+time+parts+GST= $∞
Hubris
Or I could repair it myself. How hard could it be? The belt is squeaking, the thing tis thumping, all I needed to do was put the belt back into position and see what was thumping and thump it till it couldn’t thump no more.
This is what confronted me.
But taking the back off to get at the dryer’s vitals wasn’t going to be easy, I assumed. No way would they have put screws on it that an ordinary flathead or Philips head would be able to mess with. I leapt immediately to the Internet and discovered that what I needed was a ‘qaurter-inch hex nut driver’. Nut driver?
With no idea what that was, I went immediately to Amazon, and the Australian segment of them had a panoply of ¼” hex nut drivers. I settled on one or two I won’t bore you with, but I got two because if I only get one thing, it inevitably turns out to be the wrong thing. Amazon advised me that one of the purchases would be arriving on January 26th. It shows the respect for Australia Day we currently have that the peons are still delivering on a public holiday.
I’d accomplished the part of the process I was reasonably confident about—the purchasing—but wasn’t confident that a ¼” hex nut driver was really the thing I wanted. I reasoned that I could always send them back if they weren’t the right thing or hang onto them against the day when some ¼” hex nuts would come into my life. But just to make sure, I called my nephew. He is the closest thing we have to a mechanic in the family, having once been a mechanic, and he’s always been handy with his hands.
He asked to see a picture of the nuts concerned and this is what confronted him:
He assured me that that was, indeed, the type of nut I’ve been crapping on about ad nauseam so far. It seemed like I’d ordered the right type of driver, after all. He further advised that “A socket set is a good thing to have, anyway” and I said that, since I was confident about purchasing things, I’d keep it in mind. You never know, right?
On stepping to the front door early on the Mnday there the parcel from Amazon was. I stripped it of its mailing sheath and this is what confrnted me:
After the usual nightmare of tackling plastic packaging and one false start, I discovered that the right-hand nut driver drove a nut like a maniac and in a few minutes I had remved the back of the dryer. This is what confrontd me:
Nemesis
“What the fuck?” was all I could say. This didn’t look anything like what I imagined it would be. I had visualised belts and heating elememnts and some things I could get a mental handle on, not some metal plate that came straight out of the Spanish Inquisition. At the lower left, you can see some springs.
What were they for? At thr lower right is a round cap that I had, at an earlier time I won’t bore you wiht, worked out. If you remove it you can put tubes into the round hole and vent the hot air outside. I was venting some hot air inside, well modulated through my vocal chords in much the same way as the opening of this paragraph.
However, I hadn’t really done anything, had I? I’d just taken the back off. If I dried some things in it, it would still dry, right? So I loaded it up with socks and undies and pushed the button. After two hours I discovered that the items were colder and wetter than they’d come out of the dryer as, and that there was cold air blowing out of the vent.
Apparently, I reasoend, the heating element is at the bottom of the dryer, somewhere around those springs, and the fan sucks up hot air vents into the dryer tub via the contours of the back of the thing that I had earlier removed (see above). There was nothing for it, then but to screw the back back on so the aerodynamically sophisticated fucking voodoo the designers had conjured up could do its duty. Fortunately, I’d taken a photo to guide me through the process:
In less than thirty-six minutes, I had replaced one of the ¼” hex nuts and the rest gradually fell into place like memories of a salon with four or five of my pisshead mates.
So went my handyman adventure. Note how it fulfills the style of the Greek tragedy. If Sophocles had had a tumble dryer and my mechanical aptitude, he’d’ve written this post.
Meanwhile, I struggle with writing a story that I started before all this nonsense, about a haunted tumble dryer. The Simpson dryer still works. Sometimes, it sings like a bird. Most times, it squeals like a rat. Warm, dry stuff comes out of it.
Lucky for me, they’ve got a sale on.