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The bad news came this morning as we were cleaning the house in preparation for Christmas: the dryer wouldn’t start. Andrea and I both assumed that the belt must have worn out, and I made another assumption that cost me an extra two hours on this project: I thought, “Surely maintenance must take place from the back of the appliance,” so I pulled it out from the wall, unplugged it, climbed behind it, and removed the back panel, in the process knocking loose the flexible metal conduit of the lint vent.

Puzzled that I didn’t see a way of checking the belt or the motor from the back, I asked the Internet for help, and found that most normal maintenance takes places from the FRONT of the dryer! So I unscrewed the top, flipped it back, disconnected the door cut-off switch, removed and set aside the front panel, and then removed the drum.

The belt was intact. The Internet told me to run it briefly with the drum and belt removed in order to determine whether the motor was bad, so I scratched my head a little bit because the thing won’t run without the front panel on and the door cut-off switch connected. I put the front panel back on, connected the door cut-off switch, plugged in the power, and turned it on — the motor was fine. The belt looked fine. The gaskets looked fine. I had cleaned up a little bit of lint but I have no idea why the drum wouldn’t spin earlier. I think it must have been bound up for some reason. I put the dryer back together and the drum was now spinning.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the vent conduit back on the outlets, so I spent the next two hours cursing over that and cutting my fingers on the sharp metal edges. Eventually, I got it to work, and shortened the conduit by nearly three feet. After the holidays, I think I might fit it for rigid conduit, because the flexible stuff seems to collect lint on the interior ridges.

I feel a minor sense of accomplishment from all this, but wish it had happened on some other day. Mainly I feel a sense of relief we have a means to dry Jamie’s cloth diapers that will only take half an hour or so.

The pre-built DIY brewery I bought earlier this year is now sitting in pieces on our garage floor. I realized something about DIY projects after getting it home and wired up for use — when the works of a thing are readily accessible like this, it’s difficult to impossible to resist tinkering with it. Sometimes a tweak is all that’s needed, sometimes a partial redesign is in order. The original owners’ extensive use of NPT threaded fittings allowed the brew stand to be constructed mostly of off-the-shelf pipes and hose fittings, but made parts of the system so tightly coupled, it was difficult to work on a piece of it without dismantling the whole thing.

For example, Scott and I had decided we needed to fix the leak on the RIMS, so we ordered a stainless steel tri-clamp RIMS tube, a 3-way valve, and various bits and pieces to hook it all up. I got it home and was all set to swap it in to the system, but was dismayed to realize in order remove the original RIMS, I’d first have to remove both the mash kettle and the boil kettle from the stand, because I needed to remove the platform to unbolt the RIMS. To remove the platform, I had to first remove almost all of the plumbing. The good news is that we only broke one thing, the threads on one of the pumps, when we were getting it all apart. It has two pumps mainly to avoid swapping hoses after the mash is complete. You don’t have too much else to do during the boil, so swapping a couple of hoses doesn’t bother me.

The threaded fittings are turning out to be a bigger weakness than I had originally realized – I already mentioned it’s very difficult to take apart, but it’s also touchy to put back together. You basically have to re-tape the threads on every connection each time you take it apart, otherwise it leaks. I also didn’t realize that sanitary food handling would have you disassemble and clean threaded fittings that contact the wort between every use! Oof! I’m going to look in to moving on with the tri-clover conversion; at least it’s easy to take apart and clean.