Reviving out of balance Aquasmarts

Having come across two Fisher and Paykel AquaSmart washing machines, we noticed a rather similar problem with both of them. The machine almost always went out of balance with loads, and even with no load. Comparing the amount of force that it took to depress the bowls with a new machine in the store, it was obvious the hangers/suspension were not working well. Further research showed that filling the hangers with oil fixed the problem.

One of the people who had mentioned filling the hangers with oil drilled a hole in the plastic and resealed it. I instead chose a much less invasive means of filling them, heat cycling them. In this I used transformer oil/mineral oil to fill them, although you can generally use whatever you have on hand, such as motor oil.

First, we have to remove the hangers from the machine itself.

Pop out the two caps covering the screws on both sides

And then remove the screws.

You can hang the top of the machine up with something at this point, take care to not pull on the wiring and pipes too much in the back right corner. We used an ocky strap tied to a pipe above us. The hangers can be seen in all four corners.

You need to remove the rubber bands from the hangers, just by lifting them up and off. These apparently stop the drum from spinning, and most people replace these first when their machine goes out of balance. We made this mistake, they don't do much at all.

To remove the hangers, grab them and pull them upwards. You will be able to move them off the case at this point. Note, that the drum WILL fall to the ground and make a mess of the pump, motor and drain so either disconnect those or lay the machine on its side. In this machine we used older hangers in their place temporarily.

And here are the hangers out of the machine. The shiny metal tubes at the bottom are what we want to fill with oil, which are pretty well sealed.

This was my original setup to heat cycle them, using a water heater from an old dishwasher. You can put them in anything you want, I was originally going to use a kettle but it was a bit too shallow. The fan was used to cool the oil back down after heating. Note that the plastic top and bottom of the shock absorbers will melt if they touch the heat source.

The way I decided to do this was using science, where heating the shock absorber would make the air inside expand and escape, pulling in oil as it cools. You can see the bubbles coming out in the midst of a heating cycle here. I was reaching a bit over 110 degrees Celcius before the element cut out and started melting stuff.

And you want to try to get as much air out as possible. 

After heating the hanger in oil, let it cool down to a reasonable temperature, I went to around 40 degrees Celsius most of the time, then repeat the cycle. Now, yes, this is a very long winded process, and if you want, you can modify it however you like. I ended up (after realising how long it took to fill one hanger) getting a small container of cool oil and putting them in that after being heated, allowing for a quicker cycle time. (put in hot oil -> wait for bubbles to stop coming out -> put in cold oil)

Once you're confident you have most of the oil out of the hangers, go ahead and reverse the above process to put them back in. The little circle of rubber on the shaft of the hangers just stays there, it doesn't do anything that I am aware of.

Spin, baby spin!

Once your machine is reassembled, it should work much better than it did before. The machine which was featured here was going out of balance during a rinse with nothing in it. After filling the hangers with oil, it ran through cycles perfectly. Even a load of dirty rags not distributed at all managed to go without a hitch. Hopefully this fix works for your machine!

Credit again to post #7 and #8 on F&P Aquasmart, unbalance for the idea behind this.