What Tools I use for Appliance Repair

foreign today we are going to do a video that's a little bit different I've kind of wanted to do this video for a while to show you what it takes to fix appliances we've done quite a few videos over the past few years and Beyond the videos we have to prepare a lot of appliances at our shop and I get a lot of comments from people that are trying to fix their appliances and they don't know what they need even though I kind of show people what's in the videos I gathered every single tool I could think of that our shop uses on a day-to-day basis and even not on a day-to-day basis and it really isn't that much to where you could fix as much as you want to for either a career a hobby or just a one-time off and I'm going to show you everything so let's go ahead and open our toolbox and start getting to what I want to show you today so the first thing that we are talking about is a multimeter it always shocks me how many people don't have one of these when they try to fix an appliance after watching my videos because this will tell you whether or not you actually need to fix something very often people will come to my Appliance Channel they will think that they have to spend 20 30 100 on a bunch of different parts and they tend to throw a lot of things at their points when maybe they get either the wrong part or they only needed one of a series of things it's the most important thing you can use other than well the next tool that we're going to have but this does a lot of different things I have videos on you know how you'd use these in different settings uh go over it real quick you turn it on the continuity setting tells you if the part is just straight up shot in most cases tries to send an electrical signal through whatever's in between these two things sometimes it gives a tone or noise which tells you that the part would be working or if you don't get a tone then generally it's going to tell you that it's dead other things that it can do is tell you voltage to whether or not you're getting the right amount of volts either DC or AC through something and then finally the amp clamp which we don't use a lot but this is actually really cool you just simply put this around whatever electrical wire you need to test the amperage from and it tells you if you're getting enough electricity to make the part run so the multimeters is the most probably the most important thing you will ever need to buy they start as low as like ten dollars but they go up from there I'll have a link to this and of course every other part in the feed so let's keep going because I have way too many parts to show you the next thing that is super important is just a screwdriver if the multimeter tells you what's broken this tell this gets you to whatever's broken there's a lot of different screwdrivers out there that you can pick from and use we tend to like the Irwin Klein makes another really good one I'm hoping to make my own custom screwdriver the only difference between any screwdriver you're going to find is how many different bits it has on it for appliance repair just stock some of the ones we've used in videos when we're desperate will maybe only have a screwdriver with a quarter inch hex head bit on it like this the irwins here are actually really nice because it has two or three different types of your Phillips head bits it has a 5 16 here I want to say it's a 3 8 here and then this little Dandy bit is your quarter inch which is used a whole lot on a lot of different things and then it has other bits that we've always that we always lose usually it has a smaller Phillips head and flat head here and then sometimes a square bit which is great for uh home repair masonry stuff like that but not really used an appliance repair I wish it had a Torx bit on it which if we customize and do them that's what I would want on this but otherwise this is definitely our favorite thing is I think it's like a nine and one or eleven and one which gets more use than say a six and one ever would the third most important thing are going to be your putty knives this a lot of appliances tend to have spring clips in them and this lets you get into them most good even professional techs will walk into a house with just these three tools and would be able to at least diagnose what's wrong on probably 80 to 90 percent of the appliances so this right here is enough to fix probably most appliances in anybody's house and a good set a good working set May cost you all of fifty dollars to get into a literal trade this isn't like other careers or jobs where you're going to spend a ridiculous amount of money to get into and work I think maybe all the stuff I'm going to show you is probably worth a thousand dollars and only like two of those tools take up most of that money but let's keep going and if you get tired of screwdrivers a simple drill gun is going to work really really well this is just a standard Walmart drill um when I got into appliances I thought oh I had to have you know a really high-end Milwaukee or DeWalt Bosch or something but come to find out an appliance repair no one really cares about what you have in terms of Brands the cheaper stuff works well because you're not going to be using it like you're doing carpentry I just have a simple heart quarter inch bit in it and I can use this to zip apart most appliances really really fast um any brand is fine most professionals if they do it weigh a lot they'll maybe invest in a nicer Milwaukee set but it doesn't matter what brand you really you have no one that I think in his appliance repair really are snobs at least about the drill guns that we use and of course with a drill gun you usually have to have a bit set with it I just buy whatever I can find on sale this is a heart from Walmart it has all the different bits in it that you would use for a drill gun to fix it's not it's a different Walmart brand you know anything really works as long as it has the right bit sets you need the most common ones in the US tend to be the quarter inch the 5 16 and the 3 8. you can get larger ones for a certain other heavy duty repairs like 9 16 but generally even that small little case is going to handle most of what you would ever need now if you're ever going to decide to do this for a little bit more than just a DIY and you're doing this either as a hobby or you want to go professionally one of the things that I suggest getting or looking into is any sort of management software for dealing with appliances going to different people's houses fixing things and doing it efficiently and if you have a chance make sure to download field pulse and look into their services field pulse has a lot of different cool tools that you can use for your business to create estimates to schedule or dispatch yourself or others to jobs take care of job management itself sending invoices and collecting payments from customers when you complete the job and then customer management it does a lot of CRM for you if you end up running service calls there's a lot of things you have to do when you want to fix an appliance and you can do that yourself without software and it takes a lot more time which is a lot more money but if you have software like field pulse it makes everything streamlined to get things done quicker so you can spend more time fixing things and then making a lot of money per hour instead of doing the paperwork which no one likes to do paperwork now of course you can't use a drill gun and a screwdriver without some sort of ratcheting tool set this is a standard DeWalt set this is not mine This is actually Jeff's and Jeff will probably kill me that I'm borrowing his for this video but I'm the guy that runs the company so I can take whatever I want sometimes but any standard socket set is going to work pretty good usually you have to use these to take out tubs or some of the heavier things inside of transmission depending on if you have a transmission problem you'll use these somewhat frequently but you know it just depends slip jaw wrench this is for removing water hoses or taking them on or off if you're working on a washer you're this is probably the next most important tool it's specifically to those units but man these work really really well to take off the water hoses also most washing machines are going to have different hose connectors that are going to need these so I would suggest investing in a good pair again if you're going to work a lot on washing machines best thing to do would be to get like a tool set that's going to have a lot of the smaller tools that we use such as those or side Snips or needle nose pliers none of these things matter on brand because you're using them somewhat infrequently and you're not cutting a lot of things or torquing a lot of things all at once but you definitely have to use them in appliance repair and of course I'm pulling all the things that are not in my toolbox but a simple Hammer this is a plastic Hammer we have used this to beat a lot of washing machines and employees and it still is working really good it just it's a simple plastic hammer it doesn't damage or Scuff the appliance paint in nearly as much as a full metal Hammer would but it works really well for smacking different things in people this is our door boot seal puller this is not a professional grade one this is just the cheapest one we could find on Amazon we don't use this a whole lot because we found out that sometimes this lower grade one doesn't work the best on a lot of the Oddball door boot seals LG has a really good official door boot seal tool and then Klein has one that is a small portable one that works really well too I would prefer either of those over this but the price on this is fractional compared to the LG and of course I have the video where I just simply use a wrench and cable ties to take care of a door boot which works really really well it's a little bit slower and it doesn't look very professional but hey if it works it works one of the tools that I'm going to use in an upcoming video I just got done with is a rotary saw this is a definitely more of a specific tool for specific jobs but if there's anything that won't agree with you you can always cut it off I use this to cut off the back of refrigerator panel to access them to replace insulation generally you can get these at any hardware store rotary bit sets are something you need generally for the metal cut off wheels but when you work on a lot of different appliances you're going to find that you'll use polishing wheels to clean up gear case um splines in a few different situations it's not a tool that we use a whole lot but it's one that is worth me pulling out and showing you on a screen probably one of the most unsung things that you're never going to think that you need is a simple condenser brush cleaner this is one that we've used I've used way too many times in videos and way more in person it still has lint on it because I don't know how to clean because I'm a man but when you have to clean your refrigerator these help out a lot you can use compressed air of course you can use a leaf blower a vacuum cleaner but a lot of times physically using this to clean it out works wonders and I sell these as a set for appliance cleaning kits which I'll have a link for but any sort of coil brush to clean either your refrigerator or maybe even your dryer works really really well because if you allow a lot of lint into either your dryer or your refrigerator they tend to break and not work for a long period of time maintenance is very very important thing I want to show you is a nice magnetic bit holder or screw holder this allows this holds basically whatever you put in it when you're taking apart any sort of Appliance this way you can save all your screws and put them together in different sets you can usually find these at most hardware stores for a very affordable price we probably have like 10 of these strewn throughout our shop in different places but I love using these even though I forget to use these so many times now let's talk about probably some of my favorite Oddball tools especially when it comes to electrical repair given the fact that appliances use control boards a whole lot more than they used to there's a lot of little things that you can do with Electronics to fix them and save yourself a lot of money one of the ugly secrets with appliance repair is if you can fix the board instead of replacing it you can take a part that could cost two to three hundred dollars and fix it for anywhere from 50 cents up to five dollars and save yourself a lot of money or make a lot of money if you're doing it as a professional so let's look in my electrical toolbox that I've stolen from Jeff and see what's inside first thing you're going to need to do if you ever want to deal with appliances is taking apart this is a simple Weller soldering station this takes off all the soldering points to remove the component that gets damaged Weller tends to be on the medium to high end of soldering stations it heats up quick and it works really well we've used this for I think about a year and a half and have been super happy with this specific unit but one of the things that we found that's been kind of difficult with soldering in new components is actually taking the soldering off this is a soldering pump which I think is really really really cool took us a little while to find one of these professionals that do a lot of high-end repair will use a heiko FR 301 which runs hundreds of dollars but these soldering pumps come to the tune of 20 or 30 dollars usually and essentially what it is is a soldering iron that heats the tip up and then it runs as a vacuum pump it heats up the soldering point and then you're able to press the vacuum pump and then it sucks the solder into it it works really really well it saves us a lot of time and money and it just resets and you just keep using it to pull the solder out of whatever Trace you're dealing with one of the things that you have to deal with when doing electrical repair is simply crimping connections if you're dealing with terminals or connections on either a fridge or a dryer or a washing machine sometimes you need a simple crimper crimp connector it was just some sort of Amazon special but you'd be surprised how often you use these to terminate different color connections depending on size so this one it tends to be a something we use maybe every week but you can't really do a lot of this style repair on terminals about it strippers finding a good stripper I've heard is very very important it's a Cobalt that we use typically around here we have different pairs but generally this style where everything's graduated and it's not the older bulky one matters a lot because you do have to use these to cut very very frequently this style tends to work better than the again the bulkier ones that look more rectangular at least in my opinion now let's do some other things that I find super super handy thermal gun this is just a standard thermal gun that tells you the temperature whatever you're pointing it at see can I kill myself with this is going to show up I don't know if it's showing up or not but maybe it will on the screen but this generally shows you different temperatures that you're dealing with to tell you if the dryer you're working on is heating up properly or the oven without having to go and touch something another temperature thing that we use a lot of this is an Eli Tech Data Logger what you do is set it to run through it in whatever Appliance you want to whether it's a fridge or dryer probably not a stove definitely not a stove but you can throw it in a fridge or dryer and it will track the temperature to tell you what the defrost cycle is or if the dryer is heating up properly or even too much you can throw it into a computer using the USB function and then it gives you the total data package with whatever you're dealing with and these are so handy to have when you have to show a customer whether the unit is cooling down or not I have a lot of fun with these and I'm going to use these in videos in the near future could call yourself a repair Tech if you didn't have any sort of cheater cord I did a video where I built this specific one basically this is a lamp cord with an on off switch on it you plug it into a wall you plug the wires into whatever you want to work and then you turn it on and then the part should work so you can test it away from the appliance whether or not the part works or not it works really really good with drain pumps you can just simply put the connectors on the drain pumps and then run the drain pump to see if the pump works or if it doesn't work this can save you a control board on Modern washing machines because sometimes the pump is so bad it could blow the control board up so very very very cool thing to have and almost last but not least this is probably the funnest thing that we have at our shop I've done a video on it because it's so cool this is our ESR meter this is a BK precision 881 essentially what this does is it tells you if the capacitor you're dealing with on a control board works or not you turn it on you press the leads and it tells you yes or no based on the scale whether or not it works this turns diagnostic into what I'd consider a video game and it's a very very expensive video game that you make a lot of money on I do have a full video to show you how this works where we go over some boards but what it allows you to do is test all the different capacitors on a board like this and see what works and what doesn't now this board does not work because if you look at the back it is totally destroyed it is all shot up like it's a bad Chicago weekend so this is a board I don't know why we still have it this is actually from one of the GE videos that I did where the unit won't spin normally you could go in and repair the capacitors on this if it was just a single capacitor but everything's burnt up on it take a lot of work to do the retraces on this and it's just going to be better to buy a new board if it's that damaged here's a few more mechanical Parts you'd be surprised that a set of Allen keys or hex Keys we don't use these a lot unless it deals with a refrigerator door handle so we just have one or two of these sets lying around at our shop when we have to put doors on or off oh a weekly tool if there ever was one the trampoline spring tools we use these to pull the plates off of washing machines otherwise I cosplay as Wolverine with these things but these allow you to hook down into the wash plates and then pull them out they can work in a few other situations where you're trying to dig something out not something we use all the time but again really good for pretending you're Wolverine one of the final tools that we have is an old classic this is a spanner nut wrench this works on all your old classic washing machines generally your whirlpools to take the spanner nuts off that would hold the transmissions in place again don't use these too much but we found out that there are some new units that this is a desperately important thing to use one of the last tools that I have is if you're dealing with hoses on a washing machine they always have a tendency to flood and spill out on the ground and you always want to prevent that so this is a specialty pliers they're I think they're called pinch off pliers you basically use these to cut off the flow of water going to say a drain pump so you can just clamp it down and cut the water off instead of having to let it flow or drain everywhere so if there you have an emergency in your shop or tool room these are really good to have but again probably a weekly tool this is a borescope camera this is really really good to get into certain washing machine situations where you don't want to take everything apart or drier vents that could be obstructed this syncs to your cell phone through Wi-Fi and then it uses this bore scope to look at different things you otherwise couldn't get your hands or fingers into really useful for customers to document maybe that their dryer vent is clogged and it's not your fault the thing broke or that's what they really need to fix and not you know get their appliances or paired 20 times in a row it's really something in the house because they didn't maintain it very well but that's what I had today for the tools I don't know if you like this video or not um oh there's one more tool this is the last tool this is a tub puller getting the tub out of a washing machine is probably the hardest thing that everyone glosses over in appliance repair all the appliance repair channels will show them pulling the drum out and it being free and easy and that's never the case they're usually lying about it or it's a brand new unit a lot of times the baskets are welded on because of rust or detergent or other such things plus they're pressed then by very very heavy machines this essentially screws down into the plate wherever there are attachment points it holds down and then you can take a standard socket wrench drill it down and then it will eventually it will pull the basket up it's much like a engine puller that you would have in automotive repair but this is probably this is easily the most specialty tool that we deal with it's literally just for horrible units but if you have a Whirlpool unit you could not survive without it so there's everything that I have today guys I hope that this video finds you well I'm going to have a link to every single tool that I used in this to kind of explain things again appliance repair starts out very easy this is probably one of the most expensive tools it's a little bit over 100 and then the BK precision's over two but everything else is really affordable I had to spend more time pulling the the items that we use for the video than actually doing the video because it's really not that hard and if you ever want to learn appliance repair just keep watching the channel I will have more videos on how to get into the business in the future make sure to check out field pulse if you ever want to start fixing appliances in people's house have a great day

Channel: Bens Appliances and Junk

Views: 17,038

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Id: QPuxy3XoiTo

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023