Well I decided to take a few pictures of the spider drum support before I throw it in the dump. This GE labeled machine belonged to one of my customers who owned it for about 6 years. She lives alone and used it very lightly and claims she used the soap as directed. She is a very intelligent person and I have no reason to doubt her word.

Keep in mind as you view these that I already vacuumed up about a quart of slimy powdered corrosion before I took the pictures. As you can see the spider broke into 3 pieces during an extract which resulted in quite a startling bang as it broke at high speed. She said it sounded like a 2 car pile up. She ended up spending another $700.00 purchasing the same basic machine in the slightly larger Frigidaire model. I have since checked the manual and it sports the same white metal crappy spider which will more than likely fail in another 6 years. The really annoying part of all this to me is that I own one each of these exact same machines. One is five years old so I guess we are running on borrowed time on that one. She bought the Frigidaire on my recommendation as I had not torn down her old machine yet and discovered Electrolux's dirty little secret. It would be forgivable if they would just make the spider/shaft assembly available at a reasonable cost rather than forcing you to buy a new perfectly good stainless steel basket as well. As you can see in the photos the spider/shaft is extremely easy to remove from the basket. There are 2 stainless steel bolts at the ends of the three vanes for a total of 6. Even on this very corroded spider they came right off. Unfortunately this won't do you any good as you can't order these items separately anyway. Other repair men may find this acceptable but I do not. You can order every other part of this machine as an individual part so why not the spider/shaft?

These machines are sold under Electrolux, Wascomat (WE-16) Frigidaire 17#, Gibson, Tappan, White-Westinghouse, Kenmore and some GE (as in the machine pictured here). I will try to find out if there are any others out there and for that matter if there are any that actually use stainless steel rather than the dreaded "white metal" also known as "pot metal".

In my next entry I will give a blow by blow on how to perform this repair yourself as that is the only way that dollar wise it can possibly be worth it. Also I am finding better prices on the basket/spider/shaft and I will reveal under which brand names the best prices can be found. I can tell you right now GE's prices are ridiculous (almost $200.00 more) for the exact same part. I'll try to get lots of photos. I need to replace the tub bearings in my own Gibson (same exact machine as this GE with Electrolux on the label) so that will be another opportunity to get some photos as well.

I want to end this post by repeating that outside of this "pot metal" problem and forcing you to replace a perfectly good and very expensive SS basket on these smaller machines I am a real Wascomat and Electrolux fan. I have worked on the big commercial Wascomats for 20 years and can't say enough praise for these great machines. That is one more reason why I find this on going problem all the more frustrating. Looking at the repair manuals I see no change in the current under 20# machines . They still use pot metal behind the SS basket and still only offer the replacement parts as one unit. Later.