Do-It-Yourself Story

Replaced clutch assembly. The agitator plate came off easily for me, but the big 38mm nut holding the inner tub to the axel was seized up and difficult to remove. I first tried using a pipe wrench and striking it with a small sledge as in the videos, then tried with a 12" adjustable and the sledge, but could not get it to budge. I ended up going out and buying a 38mm socket (note that most of these are 3/4 inch drive sockets... make sure you have one or buy an adapter to save you another trip back to the hardware store like me), but couldn't get it to move with the socket and a 1/2 drive wrench either. I ended up bringing in my compressor and a 1/2 inch impact wrench and it came right off. I had almost given up and was shocked when it started turning. Besides the couple hours wasted on trips to the store and spending about 30 mins trying different things to get that nut off, the most time-consuming part of the whole thing was the cleaning. The inside of the plastic outer tub, the stainless inner tub, and pretty much everything else in there was *nasty* even though I do bleach loads, run vinegar, and the tub clean packets pretty regularly. Though it took a couple of hours, the best part about doing this yourself is that you can clean everything up really nice. Knowing that the water I washed my clothes in for the last 9 years was mixing with all that sludge and mildew grosses me out. It's one of those things I was probably better off not knowing but at least now I know it's clean! It was a good half day project with all the cleaning and trips to the HW store, but it sounds like new now and is working great. Thanks for all the tips and help in the videos and reviews.