Breaking Project: Broken Dishwasher

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that the dishwasher door seemed to be sticking whenever I tried to open it.  It was almost as if it was suctioned shut.  Pulling the handle didn't work, so I had to grab the door by the side edges every time I wanted to open it.  I got sick of that pretty fast, so I decided to take and look and see what the problem was.

A quick inspection led me to realize that the problem was the result of the handle not springing back properly.  In order to get a better look, I needed to remove a bunch of screws on the inner side of the dishwasher door.

Good luck removing this without a Torx screwdriver...

All of the screws happened to be Torx screws.  This might have been a problem, but fortunately for me, I had purchased a cheap set of 20+ screwdrivers from Home Depot a few years back, and it included an assortment of Torx screwdriver heads.  Hooray!

Various screwdriver heads

Removing the screws and the handle was really quick and simple.  Once I got the handle out, a quick inspection revealed that there was some broken plastic, and that I wouldn't be able to repair it myself.  I suppose I could have tried some superglue, but there were too many tiny pieces of plastic for me to want to attempt it.

The handle mechanism

A close-up of the broken handle

I did an extensive internet search for a replacement part, and I was unable to find anything that matched my part number.  I did come up with a part that appeared to be a suitable replacement though.  The only problem I could see was that my old handle was white, and the replacement part only came in black.  Oh well.

$26 and a few days later, my replacement handle had arrived.

Replacement handle

One thing I should mention is that the electric wires in the dishwasher were still live, even though they weren't connected to anything.  I accidentally left them hanging out of the top of the dishwasher for a short while, and it resulted in my mother-in-law receiving a shock!  It tucked the wires back inside the dishwasher, and then made sure to shut off the breaker for the dishwasher before I actually started working on fixing it.

Danger! Do not touch!

When I went to install the new handle, I realized that I first needed to remove those brown pieces from the electrical wires (see picture above).  At first glance, it appeared that there was some trick to removing these, but as it turned out, they just needed to be pried off with a screwdriver.  Pop them off.  Pop the new ones on.  Piece of cake!

After that, it was simply a matter of screwing 8 screws back in place, and the job was done!  When I tested it out to make sure that it worked though, something seemed off...

Left: New black handle   Right: Old white handle

Oh no!  Even though the new handle connected perfectly, and functioned perfectly, the actual handle part was quite a bit shorter than the old one.  How weird!  The new handle is a little less comfortable to grab, but since it still works fine, I just decided to not worry about it.  The dishwasher is about 11 years old at this point, so I figure that I'll just deal with the short handle until something else fails, at which point I'll replace the whole thing.

Total Time: 30 minutes (not counting searching/ordering parts & waiting for shipping)
Total Cost: $26
Difficulty: Very Low