This is the single most common Kenmore washer platform in American homes — a Whirlpool-built direct-drive design sold for roughly a quarter-century under the 110 prefix. Its plastic drive coupler, positioned between the motor and transmission, is a deliberately sacrificial part that wears out and is replaced far more often than the transmission itself, which […]

Before the direct-drive design took over in the early 1980s, Kenmore’s top-load washers ran the tub and transmission off a belt-and-pulley system — a genuinely different drivetrain from the coupler-based direct-drive platform that replaced it, with its own distinct wear pattern centered on the belt and its pulleys rather than a drive coupler.