All too often when something breaks, we just throw it away. Some things aren’t repairable (for example light bulbs and drinking glasses), but many are! I’ve seen many a neighbor throw away good appliances and other expensive tools. In many cases, the items being thrown away had a minor, fixable break. What a waste of money!
The thing to remember is if your appliance or tool is broken, why not try to fix it? If you succeed, you saved yourself some money, not to mention the green motivation! If you don’t succeed… oh well; you were going to throw it away anyway…
Below is a list of the things I’ve successfully repaired:
- My automatic garage door rail (it just needed to be cleaned and oiled)
- The automatic garage door when it came off of the track (it came down on a open truck back-hatch door, causing it to jump off the rail).
- Countless toys (glue, untangling, cleaning battery contacts, etc.)
- Washing Machine (twice, hurray for Google!)
- Clothes Dryer (did I mention Google?)
- Lawn Mower (multiple times, and still ongoing)
- Shower Head (took the old one off and put a new one on)
- Alarm radio (the buttons were sticking; Vaseline worked miracles)
- VCR (a long time ago)
- Cassette Player (4 years ago, the band drive came off; I took it apart and put it back on).
- Car Brakes (changed the brakes in both of our cars).
- Ottoman (the wood inside broke after my son jumped on it, young kids…)
- Snow Thrower (a good tune up fixed it right up!)
Many of these broken items I figured out how to fix by thinking about the problem. But some of the things that I wasn’t sure about (car brakes, shower head replacement and my Clothes Dryer) I Googled and even watch videos on how to fix the problem (my recommendation? youtube). Moral of the story: you may want to make the Internet your first checking point for fixing problems before simply throwing things away!
Of the above list, some are relatively a straight forward repair job (Ottoman), with others will take some experimenting and tinkering with. An example of such a problem was my Clothes Dryer! Initially when I googled the problem (which was a loud squeak and later a bit of metal grinding), I thought the barrings were bad and I was going to have to replace that assembly. That would have cost almost a hundred dollars. The problem is I estimated the the entire dryer was probably only work $250 dollars. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to do that route.
After closer inspection, I noticed that the dryer drum was way to loose. So I decided to try an experiment. I took some old socks and jammed them into the top of the dryer so that the drum would fit a bit snugger. To my surprise, the sounds vanished when my wife ran some clothes in the dryer that night. So the socks acted as a temporary felt liner substitute and my wife was able to do a few built-up loads of laundry.
Of course, I didn’t stop there, next I google “dryer seal” and found the part number. I then searched for the best price for the dryer part. I wouldn’t have guessed that eBay would even have the part, let alone the lowest price… but they did! I ended up buying the felt liner for $12 dollars! Next, using a diagram of how the dryer comes apart, I took off the cover and glued the felt liner in place. That was a few years ago, and the dryer has worked perfectly every since (at least to date).
Readers, have you even thought outside of the box to sleuth and fix problems with possessions that may have broke? If so, please comment and let us know your clever solutions!
Thanks,
-MR
