About six weeks ago Linda was doing laundry and went to hang up her clothes on the retractable clothesline. When she pulled the lines out of the case, two of the lines popped off. I tried to help her re-attach them but I should have not intervened.
Linda thought that we could just re-tie the lines back to the roller. I looked inside the case and was not able to see exactly how to do this, so I suggested that I take the cover off so I can see around the roller to determine how the lines are attached. Unfortunately, she agreed.
To take off the case I had to take the clothesline off of the tree. No prob. The cover wraps around the entire case with screws every few inches. I was hoping that I could just undo one or two screws, pull the cover back and see what was going on. No dice. So I ended up taking all of the screws off and taking the cover completely off. This is when I learned that the cover was holding the two ends of the roller together for without the cover in place, the spring that was tightly wound up inside the roller quickly unwound. Crap!
The good news was that I figured out how to tie the lines back on the roller. The bad news was that the clotheslines were no longer retractable for the spring completely unwound. It took several, I do mean several, attempts to figure out how to wind the spring back up. Even when we figure out we were turning it the wrong direction we noticed that the retracting action was pretty much no existent.
We put it all back together, re-attached it to the tree and wound the spring up as much as we could. We thought we were in business for everything seemed to work. Granted, it was not as good as before, but it did seem to retract. Well, this only lasted a couple times and then it just stopped retracting.
By this point I was looking on Ebay for a replacement clothesline and was fortunate enough to fine the exact same model. Yeah! So $70 and 4 weeks later the crisis was solved for what should have been a 2 minute easy fix.
So if you have a retractable clothesline where a line has popped off the roller, DO NOT take the whole thing apart. Simply push the line over the top of the roller and pull out the bottom. Wrap it once over the line that you just feed through the top and then put the knot at the end of the line into the hole in the roller. Pull the line tight to make sure the knot is in the hole securely. That’s it.
If only I knew…