Replacing the dishwasher's wheels. You'd think this a matter just of taking the dishwasher out, removing the wheels, and putting new wheels on. Well, so it is at heart. A week ago Saturday I took the dishwasher out to the garage, set it on a matt, and turned it upside-down. The matt, and the outdoor placement, so that the residual water draining out wouldn't get on what remains of our kitchen floor. I started taking off the shell of the dishwasher, to get access to the wheels, to learn that I didn't need to do that. I had to take off a (removable) layer of insulating foam but otherwise the wheels where reasonably accessible. All I had to do was lightly tap them with a hammer and the wheels, with stems embedded in plastic sleeves, came out easily.
Of course I knew I had to replace the wheels. And I'd already gone to Ace Hardware nearby, buying a couple of new two-inch casters. I'd wanted larger wheels, on the theory that would be softer on the floor, but they didn't have four of the same kind of wheel. So I bought two packs of two wheels each, the ones I could get, and then discovered one of the packs was a different model that didn't have a stem. So I went back to exchange for one that did and discovered ...
So the old sleeve for the wheels reaches about one and a half inches long. The stems for every wheel I could find reach only one inch. This leaves a gap that just won't do on any surface. This sent me on a hurried search for sleeves of that size. Or, failing that, something that could take their place. They don't make plastic sleeves --- sockets is the proper term and that does not actually make it easier to find on hardware store web sites --- that long. Well, why not take the sleeves off the old and use them for the new? Because they don't come off, I suspect as part of a locking system to make sure the wheels stay securely on when the dishwasher is set right-side up and it's only friction holding the wheels in place.
I tried several clever improvisations to get around this, ultimately going to see what I could do to replace the plastic sleeves with something I could get from Ace Hardware. The hardware guy I started talking to had an idea that was almost there: what about using a vinyl tube or PVC pipe? This was a path that might have worked, but I went with a vinyl tube on the theory that I wasn't sure a half-inch-diameter PVC pipe would fit within the essentially alterable radius of the holes in the dishwasher's underbelly. I also wasn't sure how snugly the wheels would fit in the interior of the PVC pipe. --- And the last issue was how to make sure the pipe didn't slide out when the dishwasher was turned right-side up, a thing I was able to keep from completely happening by using the sockets that came with the new wheels but upside-down.
If this seems hard to visualize, don't worry. It didn't work. The wheel stems, having soft vinyl to lean against, tilted and collapsed under the pressure of being moved. I could barely move the thing, and left horrid black streaks that needed a magic eraser to wipe up. Tolerable for a floor in its last weeks of existence but impossible for the replacement. So I admitted defeat, took the new wheels out, put the old ones back in, and yielded to the inevitable.
The old wheels had model part numbers on them, and a quick DuckDuckGo on them found this string of numbers had never been assembled before. Searching on appliance-part web sites found that these were indeed wheel models for a line of (Whirlpool or something) washers, ages ago, long since superseded by (new numbers). And I gave in and ordered a quartet of supersession wheels, annoyingly more expensive than what Ace Hardware wanted for a couple two-inch wheels. Fine.
Yesterday ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger found someone on the community buy-nothing group that needed some two-inch casters for a project and we gave it to them. So there's someone this all brought some good to, besides boosting myself as someone vaguely familiar to the Ace Hardware people and building up my confidence that I can just take a dishwasher out to the garage and hammer things out of and back into it.
Tomorrow, all going well, we take the dishwasher out, and bring it back in with new wheels on a new floor sometime later in the week. More on this as it comes to pass.
And now to a thing that has long passed: photos from the 5th of July, Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.
Back to the Giant Coaster! You can see the train just returning past the crown, there.
Here's the lining of the walls inside, with old pictures within the arches there. Past the wall is the inclined ramp for most of the queue.
Little control panel for the operator at the end of the queue, where the operator pauses people and if need be scans their wristband or rides card.
Returning train. I'm able to get a little view of the non-romance side in the frontmost cars there.
Snap of the front of the car, and a ride operator letting people know they can get on board now.
At the end of the exit path is this sign, encouraging you to get a ride photo.
Trivia: On the 10th of December, 1973, NASA Headquarters directed Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, and the Manned Space Flight Center that the Skylab Program would be disestablished in March 1974, with a small group retained to manage the closeout of the space station. Source: Skylab: A Chronology, Roland W Newkirk, Ivan D Ertel, Courtney G Brooks. NASA SP-4011.
Currently Reading: Pogo Puce Stamp Catalog, Walt Kelly.
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Date: 2023-12-10 01:34 pm (UTC)