Severe Washer Vibration - Spin Cycle - GE GFW450SSK0WW

[EPEPE]

Hello,

I have the subject washer and wanted to report some findings after teardown for repair.

Finding #1: 

The stainless steel tub, straight from the factory, is incredibly imbalanced and is THE main cause of the vibration during a spin cycle. Yes, the dampers must be in good working order too; however, no amount of new or better dampers will ever cure the tub imbalance. The good news is that you can fix this if you care to spend some quality time with your washer... 

Why is the tub not balanced from the factory? 

This is simple. The inner tub (what your clothes go into) is made from a flat sheet of stainless steel. At the factory they punch/stamp the holes in this metal sheet then roll it into a cylinder shape. Where the ends of the flat sheet meet up they are joined together by overlapping the ends and folding them over, together, to make a seam. Well, the seam has a lot of extra metal concentrated in one area. This makes the seam location heavier, and thus the imbalance. GE (or whoever manufactures the tub for GE)  makes no effort to balance the tub. 

How did I find this?

If you have the service manual for the washer (found for free online after some digging), you can manually initiate any function of the washer after entering a maintenance mode. To manually initiate the tub spin cycle, for my washer model, I press: TEMP -> DELAY -> TEMP -> DELAY. This sequence puts the washer into maintenance mode. Next I spin the dial until the display reads function 11, which is the "test spin" mode (this is all described in the maintenance manual with details). Hit the play/pause button and it spins the drum to 400 RPM, hit play pause a 2nd time and it goes to 800RPM, hit it a 3rd time and it goes to max speed which is 1600RPM. Hit power button to stop it at anytime. 

Without ANY clothes in the washer drum I ran these spin modes and in all of the modes (400, 800, and 1600RPM) the washer shook like heck. I should note that my tub bearings and water seal are in good condition and I just installed NEW GE OEM dampers and springs too. In my case, the drum spins with very little friction from the tub bearings, so good in fact, that when you remove the drive belt from the motor/pulley and let drum alone, the heavy part of the drum (seamed area) will find the lowest point and eventually stop at the bottom. This means you now have an opportunity to add weights to make the imbalance better! I actually did all this with the washer mostly disassembled, on the rear part of the outer tub and inner drum were installed in the washer, yes, the front panel and door were also removed. YES, this is dangerous,, but only if you stick your hands/face into spinning components so don't be an idiot if you spin the thing with half of the tub removed. Not my fault if you get injured, this is not an inherently safe operation.

How to Balance the Inner Tub?

The seam is located directly under one of the three inner paddles (plastic parts on the inside of the stainless drum that toss the the clothes around). With the drive belt removed, and if you have good bearings, let the tub settle. Then, tape several washers to the INSIDE part of the drum next to each of the other two paddles. To balance mine I had to add 43 grams and 39 grams next to the other two paddles. With these weights temporarily taped tot he inner part of the drum, when you let it go the drum does not spin at all, meaning you've effectively balanced out the heavy spot. Next, because I'm insane, with my exposed tub and balance weights taped tot he INSIDE of the clothes drum, I put the washer into maintenance mode. I also had to remove the locking tab from the door and stick it into the door lock module otherwise it thinks the door is open and won't spin. 

Results?

After I temporarily taped the weights in place and spun the washer 400, 800, and 1600 RPM, the balance was glorious. WITHOUT DAMPERS ATTACHED there was only a mild vibration. To effectively make the balance weights permanent I plan to bolt in-place some weights under the plastic paddles using stainless steel hardware (no rust).

Some additional fine tuning will also be necessary and this will be an iterative process to complete this remedy. 

 

Note: this will not fix balance due to unbalanced clothes loads in the drum, it simply makes sure the stainless steel inner drum is balanced so that the washer can do a better job balancing the clothes when you have a load on.

Editorial: GE, or whoever actually makes this garbage washer, should have manufactured balanced parts from the get go. Never again will I purchase GE product. Absolute junk if I have to go to these lengths to correct manufacturing errors. Also, it should be noted, and mainly because I'm nuts, I checked the runout of the tub using a dial indicator (yeah I went there). The tub had about 0.050" runout which given the thing spins 1600RPM is unacceptable. There is no way to correct the runout because the drum is solidly formed and fixed like this from the factory. It is far too rigid to be manipulated to correct the runout issue. Note: "runout" is a measure of how out-of-round the drum is, simply put how wobbly the thing is when it spins. 

[Doriane Marshall]

Hello,

Thank you so much for sharing all your findings with the community.  Super helpful.

Doriane

[G S]

I just soaked one of my socks in water, squeezed out the excess, and weighed it. It weighed 170 grams, over twice the 82 grams (2.9 ounces) you used to balance your inner tub. A full load of laundry is never distributed evenly inside the inner drum.  I'd say that a load of laundry is nearly always out of balance by much greater amounts than the 82 grams that you are fretting over. The system of springs, shocks and (heavy) counterweights, and other mechanical systems are designed to handle a wide range laundry loads that are not evenly distributed. Regarding those "mechanical systems" that I just referred to, my Kenmore (Frigidaire) does a slow start on the spin and detects when a load is too unbalanced. If it is, it goes into a slow rotation that tumbles the wet laundry for a short time, stops, and then does the slow spin start again to test the balance of the new load distribution. It does this repeatedly until the load balance is within acceptable limits. Then it proceeds to increase the spin speed as more water is expelled until it is spinning at maximum. My guess is that your GE is supposed to do the same thing. Washer loads are never perfectly balanced. Washers are designed and built to handle load unbalances far greater than 82 grams (1/2 of a wet sock). A washer should not be freaking out if its inner tub is 82 grams heavier on one side or the other.