One of my friends in Massachusetts asked me to help fix their Viking's oven door. He reported that just having someone come out to look at it was going to cost him $500. Hey I figured, if I'm in town on business anyway why not add some appliance fixing to round out the adventure!
Symptoms
It started like this... the oven was working fine, they had just baked a pie, so the oven was pretty warm. Then they decided to use the self cleaning feature. This oven has a tricky safety feature that locks the door from the inside during cleaning. After turning on the cleaning feature, they decided to turn it off. The problem was that once the latch locked up the door, it stayed that way. The oven stayed locked shut for a week as I made my way out to the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Disassembly
When I encounter a fix project that I'm unfamiliar with, I spend a fair amount of time just getting in there and looking around. We ended up removing a bunch of parts of the oven to get some visibility into the core problem. That's a typical and I believe good strategy for you to use in your own fix-it projects. Eventually I determined that you need to remove the burners, gas line, and the sheet metal below the burners and above the oven. This gets you access to the latching mechanism.
There is another trick to get in there. Upon close inspection, you'll notice that the top of the oven door has vent slots. Upon even closer inspection, you'll see that just beyond those vent slots is the tip of the latch and that's what is holding the door shut. Trying "picking the lock" by sliding a little screw driver in and pushing the latch to the left. Bing. The door is open.
The latch mechanism is a momentary solenoid activated two position latch. Given command of the control board, the solenoid is momentarily activated to set the spring mechanism into a mode that's either keeping the latch normally open or normally closed. If it's being held normally closed, then even with the power disconnected, you're door is latched closed!
The Fix
The correct fix is to open the top of the oven up, as described previously, and replace the latch mechanism. You can buy such parts from places such as http://www.repairclinic.com/. In this particular case though, we found that a bit of manual "massaging" of the lock mechanism was enough to convince it back into the normally open mode. From there, the owner has received a recommendation not to use the self cleaning mode.
2 comments:
Your idea of using a screw driver to push my Viking oven door lock latch to the left workedbrillia Tai. I now have my o enough door open. How do I “manually massage” the latch to keep it unlocked? Thanks.
That was suppose to read-worked brilliantly and I now have my oven door open-sorry for the bad autocorrects
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