Fridge repair 101

As if I didn't work a long enough day yesterday,

I came home and decided to tackle
a little problem we had.
Our ice maker on our GE side by side
refrigerator, was not working right.
The little door that opens to dispense
the ice would stay open and you'd have to
push it close. well, this went on for awhile,
and eventually would not close at all.
This happened a couple of days ago.


So we stuffed a towel in the chute
to prevent warm air form getting
in the freezer.
Well, things like this tend to bug me,
and I figured, I'd either fix it or make it worse,
so I take the front panel off and
see all these little wires.
Then there's 4 screws to take out the next section,

So I think I should unplug the fridge.

And after I get that out,

that's were I discover the problem.
Up in the right corner, where the white arrow is,
is this funny cylinder, and a metal weight that
attaches to the arm of the door flap.
The little weight is suppose to slide in and out
of the cylinder.
Unlike this pic, ( I got these off the web.
Apparently this is a common problem with this model!)
mine was all rusty brown looking.
Cold air leaking from around the flap
caused condensation to form
and rusted the parts.
As you see in the last pic,
The weight slides in and out of the cylinder,.
and mine was sticking, because of all the
corrosion. So I took some steel wool and

reamed the cylinder out, sprayed wd-40 in

it and wiped it out with paper towels, and took
emery cloth and cleaned up the weight.
And then it would slide in and out very easily.


Put everything back to gether again,
and plugged it in, and bygolly, it works just fine now!
Doesn't it make you feel good when you figure things out?
Of course, one job leads to another. When taking the screws out, one fell on the floor and disappeared under the fridge, so I pulled the fridge out to retrieve it and YUK! I guess I hadn't cleaned under there in a l-o-n-g time! I'm certainly not putting a pic of that here! So anyway, now that's done too, and I've got to get to work!