To see if the spider is available as a single item
Mark,
To see if the spider is available as a single item; find your target FL washer model number and then search for the drum and spider parts at repairclinic, sears, and the zoo of other parts vendors. Many times the spider is sold separately, the LG spider is. In some few brands it is not and models it is not, thus one has to buy they entire assembly of spider and basket.
To actually replace the spider is really a big task, ie 4 to say 8 man hours. Once the spider starts to go the seal often leaks, then the front bearing goes too. Thus normally one has to replace the two ball bearings and seal too. In some web documented failures, some machines further have screws on the basket the puncture the plastic tub too.
It is such a devil of a job that the labor cost causes many to just scrap their bad FL washer once the spider breaks.
Bob;
a coating adds cost. If any part comes off sometimes a coating can be actually worse too, ie one traps in moisture if the coating peels any. At the several high volume consumer items places I once worked ; one considers costs down to cents or less. Thus if one makes 1 million parts, a 1/3 cent matters since it is 3333 dollars. If the coating cost 1 dollar it is 1 million bucks.
Maybe if enough FL spider failures of all brands is shown on the web, the general public might get a better product via a better design.
The sad thing is about every home FL brand in the USA has seen these aluminum spider failures and some are over a decade old. The high mucky mucks in the ivory towers of the washer makers know about these failures and are just "hoping they go away"; thus they payoff the sqweaky wheel customer with a discount on another washer, or parts about cost, etc.
One wonders if the chaps in the engineering depts are whusses, or do not care, or are beholden to a core tenet of a product with a spider that dissolves with time.
In the USA many design engineers do not touch sustaining engineering, it is a death sentence in some industries. Thus the same golden boy designs in the same fundamental flaws in newer designs an there is no learning, ie eating ones own cooking it is really manure.
In Japan engineers often live with a product its *entire lifetime*, if you screw up a design or it has field failures your butt is the one that fixes the issues. It works well, there is a sense of pride too and since one has to resolve ones screwups.
At one consumer place I worked at I found a flaw on another's design and made the required change order. A year later it was still not in place and the cost was nill. Since production waned they just order more flawed parts. The purchasing guys would get qet a kick back from the suppliers and make 250K parts versus the order of 100,000.
The same golden boy designed in the same flaw into two other NEWER products and these had field failures too, even with a design review done 1 year ago showing the design flaws . It took 4 years for the betterment to get into a new design and it was not something that had much tooling cost or risk either.
In this case the issue was one of egos, one had some folks way up in engineering who were fakes, plus purchasing on the take.
