Repair.IT – Kleenmaid TO500X Oven door hinges replacement

The other day, my son heard a cracking sound when he opened the oven door, and it wouldn’t close properly anymore.  It seems that the oven door hinges spring wasn’t working to hold the weight of the door and when closed, the door would sit ajar.

On further inspection, the pin that would connect to the springs was broken, so there was no choice except to remove the door from the oven so that I could have a better look at the problem.  Fortunately the manual showed how to remove the door, which in this case was very easy, lift it, and then pull outwards while tilting back towards the oven.  If the springs were working, we would have to normally open the door, then engage the hinge latch which would allow the door hinge to stay in the open position for the door to be removed.

I found that the part number was GN166667 and after a quick check on eBay found a supplier that had a pair of these original hinges for around AU$64 after an eBay discount was applied.  If I order this from the spare parts warehouse, I would be paying AU$55 plus delivery for each hinge, so I ordered from eBay and saved a bit of money.

On my Kleenmaid oven door, there are two screws that hold the inner door from the outer glass door.  Also around the top and sides of the inner door is a sealant that has also deteriorated.  I found by at Bunnings, a Sika 300g Black Sikaseal Appliance Sealant for AU$14.78 that has a high temperature resistance, up to 250°C which appears to be the right sealant for the job.

Next step was scraping off as much of the old sealant as I could – a razor blade would have been handy, but who has one of these nowadays with electric shavers.

A few days after I had ordered the hinges, they arrived.  The hinges are held to the inner door by three screws, two on the base, and one screw that is at the top of the hinge, only accessible when the inner door has been separated from the outer door.

The inner door, by the way had two sheets of glass – one that is facing the inside of the oven.  This means that the door assembly has three sheets of glass, so good insulation of preventing the heat from radiating through the door.

Here is a picture of the two hinges after removing from the door.  The top one should not be able to stay like that since the spring should be pulling back, except of course it is broken.  From recollection, a while ago, the door didn’t seem to be closing properly which could mean that one hinge had already failed at that time.  Also I didn’t find any broken bits of the pin, so no idea how it broke unless it had just kept wearing away, due to the door being opened and eventually there was not much left of it.  The oven is 12 years old – and I have worked on this in the past, with various electrical issues, but this was the first mechanical issue.

After the replacement hinges were installed, I then applied the sealant – it was difficult to squeeze the trigger and move the tip at the same time, to get the sealant into a good straight line with the correct thickness.  Of course, if I did this over and over again, like the appliance repairers do, I could then do a good job each time, but for my first, I did an adequate job.  Once the sealant was on, the inner door was mounted and screwed up.

I did have a bit of sealant squeeze out, so used a cloth to wipe around the edge of the inner door, and got most of the excess sealant off and cleaned up well enough.  The sealant generally takes 24 hours to cure, so it was left in the garage to do this (also the sealant smells, and wife doesn’t take kindly to stinky things in the kitchen).

The next day, I wipe the door over, since the garage is dusty – then needed to extend the hinges and lock them in the open position.  I used an adjustable spanner, to hold the tip of the hinge, then cranked it open – then moved the latch, and released the hinge.  Both hinges were done eventually.  I did slip with the spanner a couple of times, without breaking my fingers, but one was a little sore afterwards.

This picture shows the door removal and installation process – showing the movable lock that I call the latch.

Then it was a matter of getting the hinges into the slots in the oven frame, then letting it settle downwards and latch, then open the door fully, release the latches then the door can close – actually they closed very well – looked better than new, no gaps at all.

Now I have most of a tube of appliance sealant left over, who needs some?  By the way, if I got an appliance repairer to do this job, I wouldn’t need the sealant since they would have it, but it would cost AU$250 for the callout, and then plus parts and whatever additional labour is needed – so likely to be around AU$400 or so, but this has cost me AU$75 to do it myself.  There it is – another repair done, and the wife is happy!

Repair.IT – Kleenmaid TO500X Electric Oven – again

This is a followup to the previous article on the Kleenmaid TO500X Designer Multi Function Electronic Timer Oven.  Remember that after the repair, it was working, but after baking a set of frozen pies on one weekend, the next weekend – it stopped working again.  The symptoms were different this time.  The oven lights inside will work, but no heating or fans would operate.  I thought at first that it was the thermostat, since this controlled the power to the heating elements in order to turn them off to maintain a set temperature.

I switched off the power, and checked that the thermostat was in fact … working, just like last time I checked.  Ok, so scratch that idea – what else could be wrong.  Eventually after some thought and research, I was reading the oven operation manual, which suggested that on some models, there was an oven door switch which would cut the heating if the door was opened.  Yes, this oven did have a door switch, which used to cut off the heating when the door opened, but I remember that recently it had not been stopping the heating.  There is a red indicator light that shows when the heating elements are on, and in the past – this went out when the door was opened, but in the last few months, it seemed to not go out.  Maybe this could be the reason.

So, open up the housing and locate the door switch that was on the left side, check for continuity, and nothing – even when the button was pressed all the way.  This had failed so checking for a replacement – Metalflex MS-385 seems a common part, but this one was shaped differently.  The local oven parts stores didn’t seem to show this as a spare part – so maybe I can just bypass it, like I did with the relay.

After I had written the previous article on this oven, I remembered reading that this particular model would disable the power if the clock was not set – as a fail-safe.  By applying the power and setting the clock, I could hear a click from the clock area.  Perhaps the relay was now being turned on.  But then – how to explain the previous problem?  Unless the door switch had decided to become intermittent, and sort of arc’ed over – maybe the timer electronics detected this as a fault and cut the relay.

I had tested the clock board and controller out of the housing and had not been setting the clock, so the relay would not have been turned on.  Bypassing the relay would allow the power to be available independently, so maybe the relay is working again, after a power reset.  To test this hypothesis, I decided to remove the bypass on the relay and just have a bypass on the door switch.

I reassembled the door switch mechanism and then closed up the oven, and went and replaced the fuse that I had pulled out in order to remove power to the oven.  The oven clock was now blinking and after setting the time – a couple of seconds later, I heard a click which could have been the relay turning on.  I used the control to turn on the light, and the light came on – fantastic.  Selecting the fan, and yes – the fan would spin up.  Next, turn the thermostat, and the thermostat indicator light came on – meaning that power was being applied through the thermostat.

Well that is good, I have a working oven again – except that the door switch is no longer operational – but it was an optional feature anyway, which helped for safety – but most of these ovens don’t have one.  It looks like this oven is now repaired, again – and hopefully for good.  In the meantime, I will see whether I can locate a suitable replacement switch to restore its full function.

Rectify.IT – Kleenmaid TO500X Designer Multi Function Electronic Timer Oven

One day, my son turned on the electric oven to bake something for lunch.  I only found out when I got home that the oven had stopped working.  It seemed that he turned on the oven and after a short time, there was a sound, and it went dark, with only the clock showing.  This oven is a Kleenmaid TO500X which was quite expensive when we bought it back in 2007, and a few years later, Kleenmaid went out of business only to be resurrected after that.

With the digital clock working, it meant that it was getting power, but none of the other controls, such as oven light, fan, grill – even the thermostat light was dark.  When I got around to it, I turned off the oven power at the switchboard, and pulled out the oven – removed  a few metal panels so that I could inspect the inside of it.

Typically what usually happens is that the thermostat fails, so I had been checking on prices of thermostats.  Anyway, with the covers off, I could check that the thermostat was – surprisingly ok, by turning the knob to any temperature, the contacts show a connection – which it should if it is working.

I decided to check the heating elements anyway, and each element had a measurable resistance meaning it should be functional.  I couldn’t see anything else that might be wrong, so closed it up and went to do more research.  After some further time, as in days, I came back to the oven, to check if the thermal overload had triggered.  I found the device screwed onto the rear fan mount, but it showed continuity – and anyway, it would only be a problem if the thermostat had failed in the on position and caused overheating – which it didn’t have time to do.

Back to the drawing board – so anyway, I woke up one morning and realised something that had been staring me in the face – this multi function over has a timer switch that can cut the power after a set time – I use it all the time when cooking frozen pies, so that I don’t overcook them, as in – burn them to a crisp.  Sure enough, after opening the oven again, the clock timer module has a board on the back with a relay, where the relay contacts control power to the thermostat – now we are getting somewhere.

Removing the clock timer module is complicated, by first removing the thermostat and the control switch – but the hard part was removing the front knobs which I worked out, just need some brute force.  After that the assembly could be removed, then the clock timer module removed from the metal frame.

Removing the circuit boards from the module was also a bit of a job, would be handy to a lot more hands, but eventually it came out.  I checked the components and worked out that the relay was driven by a signal going to a PNP transistor, and eventually after applying some power (albeit carefully) confirmed to my satisfaction that there was no power going to the relay.  I had earlier confirmed that putting 12V onto the relay allowed it to switch and I confirmed that the contacts were closing correctly, hence the relay is good – therefore it was not getting a signal to turn on.

Debugging it further would require removing the display module in order to work out what was wrong with the timer.  The display has about 20 pins, being a vacuum fluorescent display – which is not an easy job, as I found that my desoldering station wasn’t heating correctly.  So, to fix this, I decided to just bypass the relay – effectively by connecting the contacts to make it think that the relay was on.  The relay contacts are Faston connectors and I remembered having a piggyback adapter in my stock of parts, so after checking a few boxes, found my little adapter.  It plugs into one terminal and allows two cables to plug in – the ones that originally went to each relay contact, now go to this adapter.

After doing this, I started reassembling the control panel, putting wires back on – in the correct place which is why I usually take photographs of anything that has lots of wires.  To my piggyback adapter, the red and orange wires are connected – which originally was to the relay contacts.

Then the final test, was to turn the oven power back on, and voila – the oven now works.  I checked that the internal light came on, that I could choose heating modes and more importantly, if I set a temperature, the thermostat light shows that it is heating, so all good, except that we have lost the timer function – not a big problem.  A replacement timer module would cost almost $500 which is already close to the cost of a new electric oven.  The moral of the story, is that sometimes a repair only has to make the device work again, and if we accept that some functionality is lost, then that is ok.

Of course, I could have spent more time to actually determine the cause of the failure – but we needed a working oven, and adding this $2 part made it work.