The washing machine was broken. It wasn’t agitating the clothes and therefore not washing them so much as just rinsing them in water. A visit from the repairman would cost at least $60. No, thank you!
We dissected the agitator and found these little flaps with worn teeth. I later found out these are called “Agitator dogs”.
With a quick online search for our machine’s model number at Searspartsdirect.com we found the exploded diagram of our machine. Using this diagram we could identify the part number of the pieces in our hands. We looked them up and ordered replacements from Sears. It cost about 9 dollars.
A couple days later the part arrived and less than 10 minutes later the wash machine was working great!
I can’t believe we used to pay people to fix things!
I wanted to post some pictures to show where this part is, but while looking for a good pic I found this video that goes through the entire repair instead.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5wIN1J70-Y]