As far as galvanic corrosion is concerned, outside factors aside, the life of the anode will depend on the mass of material and the surface area between mating materials. If one manufacturer uses thin stamped aluminum spiders, it will most definitely have a considerably shorter life than one designed from substantially thicker cast aluminum or aluminum plate. Similarly, a spider arm with small connection arms that mate with the drum on areas not much bigger than the bolt head will likely fail somewhere in the arm in a shorter period than a comparable spider arm with beefier arms and larger mating surfaces.
So maybe there are manufacturers who conservatively design their arms to account for this? Hopefully so. What I've seen of pictures of Samsung spider arms online leans much more towards the thinner stamped aluminum design. Then again, our Samsung washer is presumed to be about 13 years old (only owned house for 5 years, but whole home was rehabbed in 2007), and has only been out of balance for the last year or less. But when it comes to corrosion, there are sooooo many factors involved. Its nearly impossible to predict service life of metals subject to corrosion sometimes.
Case in point, I just inspected a 2-cell aluminum corrugated structural plate pipe-arch culvert built around 1990 that is riddled with holes from corrosion; there's a pipe arch 30ft up the road that is made from the exact same corrugated aluminum plate from the same manufacturer and it is under the same amount of fill on the same roadway, and it has zero measurable corrosion. Another example is with epoxy-coated rebar in bridge decks. My one professor I had at Virginia Tech conducted decades of research on ECR, and he and others in the industry have been unable to accurately predict or consistently replicate in the lab the accelerated corrosion issues that are unique to ECR. They know it's due to the porosity of epoxy coatings exposed to chlorides creating HCl acid that becomes trapped in the epoxy coating and destroys the metal very very fast, but they still could not consistently replicate this in testing. Despite that, there have been a number of deck collapses in Virginia and other states that are attributed to the use of ECR, so VDOT has banned its use on state projects.
Point is, a lot of times it's very very difficult to predict the speed of corrosion or even identify the individual causes of corrosion.
So maybe there are manufacturers who conservatively design their arms to account for this? Hopefully so. What I've seen of pictures of Samsung spider arms online leans much more towards the thinner stamped aluminum design. Then again, our Samsung washer is presumed to be about 13 years old (only owned house for 5 years, but whole home was rehabbed in 2007), and has only been out of balance for the last year or less. But when it comes to corrosion, there are sooooo many factors involved. Its nearly impossible to predict service life of metals subject to corrosion sometimes.
Case in point, I just inspected a 2-cell aluminum corrugated structural plate pipe-arch culvert built around 1990 that is riddled with holes from corrosion; there's a pipe arch 30ft up the road that is made from the exact same corrugated aluminum plate from the same manufacturer and it is under the same amount of fill on the same roadway, and it has zero measurable corrosion. Another example is with epoxy-coated rebar in bridge decks. My one professor I had at Virginia Tech conducted decades of research on ECR, and he and others in the industry have been unable to accurately predict or consistently replicate in the lab the accelerated corrosion issues that are unique to ECR. They know it's due to the porosity of epoxy coatings exposed to chlorides creating HCl acid that becomes trapped in the epoxy coating and destroys the metal very very fast, but they still could not consistently replicate this in testing. Despite that, there have been a number of deck collapses in Virginia and other states that are attributed to the use of ECR, so VDOT has banned its use on state projects.
Point is, a lot of times it's very very difficult to predict the speed of corrosion or even identify the individual causes of corrosion.
