Maytag Performa Dryer - Fixing an overheating drum roller

I have a Maytag Performa MDE2300AYW dryer. It was making loud squeaking noises. I fixed the noise with cleaning, aluminum foil, and high temperature aluminum tape. Others may find my kludge fix useful.

The right drum roller sits above the heater, and gets roasted by it - bad design. I found a LOT of corrosion and burned dust around the roller. After a lot of disassembly and temporarily pulling the drum, my wife and I thoroughly cleaned the dust out of the dryer plenum spaces. I removed the snap ring holding the right drum roller, and polished the roller axle and shaft with very fine grit emery paper.

I noticed that if I wiggled the heater duct, it squeaked within the back duct. The ducts are ordinary steel, dull gray. Dull gray = radiates lots of heat. So I wrapped the bottom duct with a couple layers of shiny aluminum foil (inches away from the electrical contacts) and taped it down with shiny aluminum heating duct tape. I also wrapped the inside of the vertical duct hole (where the heater duct fits inside) with more shiny heating duct tape. The shiny surfaces radiate much less heat, so the duct is no longer heating the drum wheel, and the round duct now fits snugly into the vertical duct. By confining more heat to the duct, more heat goes to the clothes, while the plenum between drum and cabinet runs a bit cooler. This is how the dryer should have been designed in the first place.

Now the dryer runs very quietly - the round duct is held in place and does not squeak and scrape. The drum roller turns freely and does not squeak. It is quieter than it was when we bought it. I hope it will last a long time until the next cleaning. It is time consuming work to open these up, even with my wife helping.

Oh - and while I was in there, I pulled one of the spade connections to disable the "cycle complete" buzzer, and wrapped the loose connector with electrical tape to the outside of the other wire. We sometimes run the dryer before going to bed, and don't need a wakeup buzz an hour later.