Triumph (hopefully)

About two months ago (maybe more)  my dryer started squeaking.  At first it was intermitten, so I tried to ignore it.  It got to the point where I couldn't dry anything at night, because the loud squeakiness would keep my kids from falling asleep.  Not that I do a lot of laundry at night, but it happens occasionally, mostly with my kitchen towels. 

Anyway, I tried to get some ideas from my friend, the internet.  There's so much garbage out there, that it can be hard to find good solid info.  I found a site that seemed promising.  It was a guy who has a repair business, but he also sells repair kits with instructions and pictures.   So I bought a little kit specific to my dryer.  That was more than a month ago.  When it arrived, the pictures were less than stellar, very dark, hard to make out.  I was a little intimidated, plus it was almost Christmas, so I shoved the parts into the black hole that is my bedroom, and forgot about it for a while.  Except when I was drying clothes, and then I just tried to ignore the increasingly loud and now continuous squeak.

Finally, today I decided that I had to get it done.  I made sure all the laundry was completely finished, and attacked.  As it turns out, the pictures were good enough.  Once you are looking into the bowels of your dryer, it is pretty self explanatory.  Or at least the sentence next to the dark picture was clear enough that the dark picture was sufficient.  Dryers (or at least mine) are not very complex at all.  The kit I bought contained some felt thingy's, a glide thingy, a pully thingy, a new belt, and a ball and socket type of thingy (basically all the moving parts that get wear and tear).   So Aaron and I replaced all the parts and cleaned up all the lint (wow, that was fun!), and magically I have a nice new-ish dryer. 

It was very empowering.  I feel like a really cool person now.  And I feel like I understand how my dryer works.  I turned it on for a second, and it worked, but I didn't want to leave it on because A. I didn't have anything to dry, and B. there is some adhesive on the felt that might need a little longer to cure, though the instructions didn't say any specific time frame.  I probably could use it if I needed to, I just thought it best to wait since I don't need to dry anything.  During the brief minute I had it turned on, no squeak, so hopefully my little experiment with appliance repair was a success.  I meant to take a picture when I had the entire dryer ripped apart and parts spread throughout my bedroom, but never got around to it.  Maybe next time.