Engineering Marvels

I'm sure I've talked (joked) about this before. My darling husband fixes EVERYTHING regardless of whether I would have preferred to trash the broken item and replace it with something new.

But there are times this comes in really handy.

On Sunday I went into the laundry room to get something and stepped into a puddle of water. There is a small bathroom on the other side and I felt certain I knew the reason for the water. A certain small child had been playing in the sink earlier and had probably extended their play area into the laundry room. But upon further inspection I noticed that the puddle was coming from underneath the washer.

A little back story about this washer - My husband use to work for BSH (Bosch) in North Carolina. He was one of the test engineers for the washing machines. So periodically people would be offered a shiny new washer/dryer set if they would fill out a questionnaire every time they did laundry. It usually lasted for two months and then you could keep the units for a very small fee. I don't think the engineers were supposed to be on that list of testers, but  he got us on the list. It wasn't a model that would necessarily end up on the showroom floor though. Anything that came back negative in the questionnaires would be fixed in a newer, updated model. But because my husband worked there he would often come home with a new computer (yes, my washer and dryer have computers in them) or a new side panel, etc. So really these things are high-end Frankensteins.

Less than a year after we moved here, the washer/dryer section of the plant closed down and Bosch no longer makes full size washer and dryers for the US market.

So when Jon took the washer apart and noticed that one of the hoses had worn a small hole in it, we didn't know what to do. He put a call into a friend who still works at Bosch to see if perhaps a spare hose might still be lying around somewhere. But in the mean time. . .

Jon finds a piece of plastic that wore the hole in the hose and removes it. Then he uses a bicycle tire patch to patch the hole until the replacement part (one was found) could come in. I've washed quite a few loads since then with no problems. Isn't my husband amazing?! I wouldn't have known how to get the top off the washer, let alone known how to find the problem. And I certainly wouldn't have thought of using a bicycle tire patch to fix the hole.