Do-It-Yourself Story

The french door spring sleeve (DA81-01346A) wore down and broke without our knowledge. It appears the sleeve broke into multiple pieces and actually fell out of the fridge from opening and closing the french doors. It's so small no one seemed to notice what had happened. Without that sleeve in place the spring (DA81-01345B) itself wore into the flipper assembly (DA97-07276E) plastic. This caused permanent wear and damage that eventually caused the plastic flipper assembly to fail. If you own a fridge designed like this I'd order a few extra spring sleeves. This is a part that is meant to take the abuse of repeated open and closing of the fridge doors. Keep and eye on it and replace it as needed. This'll save you from having to replacing the entire flipper assembly. Heed this advice! These flipper assemblies are getting hard to come by. I'd expect that to continue to get worse until you can't find the parts to repair your own fridge. Our fridge is now over 10 years old. The more time I can get out of it from making my own repairs the better prepared I'll have saved to afford a new fridge in the future.