How do you repair a 28 year old dish washer ?

Yes our dish washer gave up the other night..... I mean how dare it !!! it's only 28 years old !!! white goods aren't what they used to be are they ?????

it's an Indesit CCCXX ....(I wonder how many will get that joke) ..... basically it was made in 1982 just after the fall of the roman empire.....(for those of you slow off the mark) .....suffice to say there are NO parts you can buy on the planet which will fit it.... lets just say the kids were getting very nervous of having to wash by hand the amount of plates this family gets through in an average day....

if you click on the photo you can see just above the top bearing of the electric motor the windings which power the motor.... and if you look very carefully you can see what seems to be a copper wire pointing upwards.... Yup it was damaged when the spring that stops the dishwasher door from slamming down on the floor when you open the door snapped.... it whipped back and in the process ripped out a load of wires from the windings of the motor... killing the motor dead.... the dishwasher just carried on filling up until the cut out activated to stop your kitchen floor from becoming a swimming pool....

Anyway I first off had to manage to get a picture of the pump by thrusting my hand under the dish washer and guessing where the pump was and hoping my autofocus worked..... it did .... and I showed the picture to my Father and he said "Yup I think I have one of those motors in my shed" needless to say he rang back and said "when do you want me to bring it down ??" no sooner said than done we had the dishwasher out and on it's back and with some completely inadequate tools for the job, namely a set of mole grips and an adjustable spanner we had the old motor out..... that's when we hit the major problem in that the new pump would only fit in the machine if we compressed it with a 40 ton press and it lost about 3 inches in height....

Obviously we needed a rethink, so on closer inspection and much spatial awareness grey cells firing in unison we eventually concluded that the motor although of a different type was actually of the same pattern albeit bolted onto a different pump..... Ahhhh we were getting somewhere....or to use an old army term.... "we were cooking on gas"

.... No.....we weren't....... it turned out the rotor shaft was a different diameter to the bearing on the existing motor housing (following me still ?) .....


ahhhh but we "could" in theory remove the bearing from the old motor and replace that in the new motor housing..... there followed much grunting and various swear words under my breath.... eventually I got the bearing out and I replaced it......


Voilà .... one rebuilt electric motor using the old rotor and bearing..... being of the wary type I insisted that we test it so sweeping aside all health and safety I cut off a mains cable and bared the wires with my teeth...... and plugged said mains cable into the socket, then gingerly touched the live and neutral terminals.....(I didn't bother with earth.... I live life on the edge I do..... besides I was holding my lucky rabbits foot....)

it (of course) sprang to life.... all that remained then was to put the new cannibalised electric motor and pump housing back into the dish washer, put the kettle on make some well deserved tea and wait for the drain cycle...... as you can see from the picture above on the right we have the old damaged motor and on the left we have the donor motor .... and the offending door spring which caused the failure in the first place......

Get in there...... job done and no screws left over !!!