Taking apart a 1964 Montgomery Wards/Norge Plus-Capacity Washer

[Unimatic1140]

Some of you guys might remember just over a year ago Fred found this delicious MW washer on craigslist, <a href=http://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?25617 target=_blank>here is the original post<a>. The machine had a few problems at first, but I was able to fix them and get it running rather fast. I got about 25 to 30 washings out of the machine before a leaky main water seal destroyed the main spin bearing and it started to roar.

So I put the machine out of service for a few months and finally got around to drag it into the workshop and started taking it apart. I have some extra parts from the 1970s MW washer as I took it apart for spare parts last summer. I also have a new water seal for the machine in my parts stock.

I was surprised that taking the 1964 Wards apart was easier than taking the 1974 Wards apart as there were less parts frozen on the earlier machine.[this post was last edited: 11/21/2010-23:42]

 

[Unimatic1140]

Step one was to remove the agitator and agitator drive block. I unscrewed the set screw and gently tapped up on the block with a hammer to remove it. Then I removed the agitator shaft water seal under the block.

Most blocks need to be torched to remove them but this one was easy.

 

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I took my torch and heated each bolt one at a time, then I took a 1/2 wrench and a mallet and pounded to get each one to turn. The heat helps loosen the bolts so the heads hopefully wont break off.

 

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Once the bolts were out I took a screwdriver to pry up the basket hold down ring and removed it.

 

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With the basket now ready to come out, I opened up the top, removed the hose to fill flume, and removed the clips that hold down the tub ring. Then I pulled off the tub ring.

 

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With the tub ring out I heated around where the basket hold down ring was and rocked the basket until it loosened and I was able to pull it up and out.

 

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Now its time to remove the outer tub. So I headed the 8 hold down bolts and removed them in the same manner that I removed the basket hold down bolts.

 

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Look how the old outer tub hold down ring has disentegarted to almost nothing. The ring in the background is out of the '74 Wards. Its a good thing I saved those parts from that machine.

 

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In order to get the outer tub screws out I used my Vice-Grip gripping screwdriver trick. It give me much more leverage to turn those screws, it worked perfectly on all of them.

 

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I removed to pump to outer tub hose along with the air pressure hose and pulled out the outer tub. You can see the transmission below...

 

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Now here are the parts I needed to get down to to find and repair the seal and bearing.

 

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You have to remove each of these parts in this order...

 

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After I removed the ring and washer, I removed the set screw in the spanner nut and used a pipe wrench to turn the nut counter-clockwise and unscrewed it off the shaft. Then I took my pipe wrench and unscrewed the Basket Tube Hub off the shaft as well.

Norge made special spanner wrenches to do this, but a pipe wrench works just as well.

 

[Unimatic1140]

With the basket hub off you can see the bad water seal and bearing underneath. I then take a hammer and tap up on the Outer Tub Support to remove it from the shaft, unlike the other items its not screwed onto the spin shaft.

 

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With the Outer Tub Support on the workbench I can pry out the water seal. I have a new one of these, I suspect they are still relatively easy to find since this design was used for many years.

 

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With the seal off you can see why the machine was roaring during spin, this is the main spin bearing all rusted and corroded from the leaky seal.

 

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After cleaning up a bit around the bearing I then remove the bearing retaining ring...

 

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The bearing is press fit into the hub, so I turned the hub over and used a large socket and a mallet to pound out the bearing from the hub...

 

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And here we go, the old bearing is removed and ready to replace. I'm going to take it into my bearing store tomorrow, its a Fafnir bearning #9106KDD.

More to come when I see if they have it in stock or not.

 

[toploader55]

Thank you Robert

As always, Another education in keeping our machines alive.

Eddie