Do-It-Yourself Story

I had a slow leak from the very front of my LG washer, so I was pretty sure that it was just the gasket leaking, and not any of the hoses. It's not a complicated repair, with the usual confidence-inspiring video from Matt. There are three things to be aware of: 1) I originally ordered the wrong gasket. My model number is WM2277HW /01, which the APP website does not recognize. It only recognizes /00 or no suffix whatsoever. The correct part number for the /01 is 4986ER0004B. The easy way to tell is whether there are any hoses connected to this gasket in your washer or not. If you have a drain hose in the bottom, you want to order part number 4986ER0004F. (My washer does not have any connections whatsoever to this gasket, so I didn't actually have to worry about cutting out one of the molded connectors). 2) It was a real pain to seat this gasket to the inner seal, next to the tub. I had 95% of it in place and it just did NOT want to seat the rest of the way. I ended up putting a light bead of dish soap along the plastic lip in that section, and it popped right on. I figured that it would be the next day before I actually ran the washer, and the minor amount of soap would have dried out by then, and the gasket clamp holds it tight anyway. 3) The inner gasket clamp is kind of a pain to get back into place. I guess there's a special tool for this, but I just used a pair of vice grips. You have to hook the loop in the spring over the formed hook on the other end, and it requires a lot of force to stretch the spring enough. Be sure that you have the loop and hook lined up properly because the vice grips have to be really snugged down tight and you won't have a lot of flexibility. That said, it only took about 5 minutes. The root cause of this was probably a buildup of crud on the underside of the door window, which prevented the gasket from sealing properly, but the gasket is about 15 years old, permanently stained in places, and had lint build up in a bunch of places, so I'm still glad I replaced it. My washer looks and runs like it's brand new again.