OK, here's a thread to post your moments of glory. I am not a trained handy person but always give a challenging repair job a try. I can't afford to hire repair people, they all make considerably more money an hour than I do.
Yesterday I surprised myself and fixed my range. There was a power outage on Thursday and it cause the oven door to lock. It is mechanical and there is no lever for you to reach to undo it. I started by letting it go through a cleaning cycle. It still didn't unlock. I switched off the breaker and I began to dismantle the cook top to try and get at the lock.
I found a relay switch and was unable to move the lock so I took a piece of thin wire and wrapped it around the relay switch which depressed a small lever on the side of the relay.
I switched the breaker back on and the oven door lock began rotating. It is gear driven but the gear is buried under more housing. I watched the rotation of the lock lever and saw where the door would release at a certain point. As long as I kept the relay switch wired it kept turning the gear. Now I knew where I wanted it to stop so the oven door was functional. I switched the power off and removed the wire from the switch.
Powered it back up and it stayed put, fixed! While I was 'under the hood' I fooled around with all the wires and solved another problem, a loose connection for the LED display. So far all is good! I baked a pizza for dinner.
Other stuff I did that I found out is really simple: replacing all of the faucets in the house. EASY, just takes a little time. Tiling floors: also easy, even cutting tile is easy. Sure has saved me some money.
Yesterday I surprised myself and fixed my range. There was a power outage on Thursday and it cause the oven door to lock. It is mechanical and there is no lever for you to reach to undo it. I started by letting it go through a cleaning cycle. It still didn't unlock. I switched off the breaker and I began to dismantle the cook top to try and get at the lock.
I found a relay switch and was unable to move the lock so I took a piece of thin wire and wrapped it around the relay switch which depressed a small lever on the side of the relay.
I switched the breaker back on and the oven door lock began rotating. It is gear driven but the gear is buried under more housing. I watched the rotation of the lock lever and saw where the door would release at a certain point. As long as I kept the relay switch wired it kept turning the gear. Now I knew where I wanted it to stop so the oven door was functional. I switched the power off and removed the wire from the switch.
Powered it back up and it stayed put, fixed! While I was 'under the hood' I fooled around with all the wires and solved another problem, a loose connection for the LED display. So far all is good! I baked a pizza for dinner.
Other stuff I did that I found out is really simple: replacing all of the faucets in the house. EASY, just takes a little time. Tiling floors: also easy, even cutting tile is easy. Sure has saved me some money.
