Repairing a Samsung front-loading dryer

Sun, Jul 30, 2017

A few days ago my wife emailed me to say our dryer was screwed up. Her evaluation of the situation was “it smells like burnt rubber and is making a horrible sound”. So I had her unplug it and make sure it wasn’t smoldering or outright on fire.

That evening I was having an internal debate about whether to dig in and try to assess and fix the thing myself, call somebody, or just cut right to buying a new one. This thing is seven years old afterall and I have the impression they make these things to last about 5 years. However, my wife description of the smell of burnt rubber sounded awfully like a belt was involved, and I hate to buy a whole new appliance just because of a belt.

I took to the YouTubes to see if I could find a video, and lo unto me came the video I needed.

The video demonstration of disassembly/reassembly in the video was for a slightly different model than the one I have, but other than wiring harness difference behind the control panel the steps were identical.

I was able to confirm my suspicion that the issue was the belt - it hadn’t broken, so it still turned the drum. Instead of breaking cleanly it had sheered right down the entire length of the belt and the half that sheered off had wrapped itself around the drive shaft causing the smell a the awful sound. A simple belt replacement was all I needed, and once that arrived from Amazon I was able to reassemble everything without difficulty thanks to the RepairClinic.com video on YouTube.

I’m sad that of all things this is what got me back to the blog, but whatever works.