DIY Project

A few days ago my wife called me at work to tell me that the top of oven-top Kenmore microwave melted. I was confused until I got home and saw the white circular plastic piece (center-top of microwave) with plasticle -- oil was dripping from the melted plastic. WOW! I didn't know microwave could melt its own plastic parts.

I pulled the plastic piece off and found out that oil had somehow accumulated on top and the microwave must have heated up the oil and then eventually melted the plastic. That oil looks and smells like cooking grease so it probably accumulated in the past 5 years. We briefly discussed buying a new microwave or calling in a repairman but then the cheap side of me thought that it would be economical for me to fix it myself... after all, it shouldn't cost more than $10 to buy that piece of circular plastic... so I naively thought.

Well, it turns out that this piece is called a Microwave inlet-cover and the cheapest I could find on-line was $41.05 + shipping from AppliancePartsPros! Yikes! It even has a yellow piece that doesn't seem to exist in our Kenmore microwave. I called up the customer support to see if it comes installation instruction -- and I was told that due to the high-wattage danger of working with microwave, they recommend having professionals perform fixes so they do not provide installation instructions with parts! HUH? I then decided to take a risk and ordered the part anyways -- figuring that I should be able to stick 4 plastic screws to secure a circular plastic piece in place.

The partquickly arrived (much faster than the Dell camera/lens and the credit card charge did not include surprising tax charges) within 2 days. In fact, it came in on the same day when the camera lens arrived (ordered more than a month earlier). I had to put off the installation since it was more important to check out the much-awaited lens to whine/complain about how out-of-focus it was and how Dell overcharged my credit card.

Tonight I finally got around to installing the plastic cover after cleaning microwave and wiping off some of the grease accumulated in the inet. The first thing I noticed was that I had to choose either the yellow cover or the white cover -- but not both (screws aren't long enough). I picked the white one. However, that's when real work started. I found out that the plastic push-in screws would drop off due to gravity working on the cover. This meant I had to scrap off the sealant left-over and re-apply new ones to cause the cover to stick to the top! Not being the most handyman around, I found a flat-head screw-driver and started scraping/digging. It took me 30 minutes to get that gunk off the top of the microwave. It took me another 15 minutes to squeeze enough of the sealant onto the plastic cover. It was pretty much a done deal after that... I felt like a pro.

I was too chicken to turn on the microwave tonight. We will find out if it still works tomorrow.