Many years ago when my kids were still small our washing machine broke down and I decided to mend it in the living room. The fault was not electrical but mechanical. The big aluminium wheel that spun the drum was broken. To get that thing off required the removal of nut and bolts, springs and washers, and four precision bearings.
I laid everything out on clean newspaper on the floor. Everything in its place so I could put it all back together again. It was then that my young son decided that the small screws and the lovely small washers were in actual fact sweets and began to pick them up and put them in his mouth. There is no reasoning with a boy who is nearly two years old. I was torn between dismantling the washing machine, and preventing my son from choking on a delicious looking gudgeon pin.
It was a fortnight before I got everything back together again, and the nightmare memory that I still have is putting one set of bearings on the hot plate for them to expand and another set of bearings soaked in olive oil in the fridge to contract. Precision bearings are so precise that you have to trick them with hot and cold and oil to get them to fit together. I was a desperate man using desperate measures. A rubber mallet to tap them in place would also have been handy, but I used a good old fashioned Stanley clawheaded hammer to bash the buggers together.
After much pain, sweat, and effort the washing machine was back together again, though there were a few bolts and springs that I couldn't find a place for so I just left them out. That washing machine never spun again, and I nearly gave myself a hernia trying to carry it to the dumpster.
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