450: Removing microwave for repair

[Rickthesailor]

HI,

Has anyone removed their microwave... I got the wood facia off, but there are four foot pegs that fit into the base wood supports, and on top there is a 3 cm by 5 cm piece of wood set on edge to stop the microwave from moving up, and it looks like it is screwed in place... I can clear the front pegs but not the rear ones... Is there a trick to this that I am missing?

Thanks, Rick

[dcareri]

On my 450 the wood supports in which the feet of the microwave sit are attached by screws from the underneath of the microwave cabinet. After removing the screws you can slide out the wood supports.

[Rickthesailor]

Originally Posted by dcareri

On my 450 the wood supports in which the feet of the microwave sit are attached by screws from the underneath of the microwave cabinet. After removing the screws you can slide out the wood supports.

HI,

Thanks... Mine does not have any screws from under the microwave cabinet... I checked the cabinet above the microwave and it had a couple of screws at the front, but removing them had no impact..

Regards, Rick

[Rickthesailor]

HI,

Finally got the microwave removed, but it took brute force. Getting the facia off the front of the opening was easy, but the microwave itself was not.

This is on a 2016 L450F, so other years may be different.

The microwave is an LG MHR-6883B. It has 4 pegs on the bottom which fit into holes in the wood that it sits on. These wood base supports appear to be glued and screwed in place. There is no access to the base support from under the cabinet. There is another support on top of the microwave that stops if from lifting. This is connected to another wood structure that is screwed into the top of the cabinet.

Since we could not lift the microwave to clear the bottom pegs, we tried to address the top structure. There are 3 screws across the front that can be removed with a small ratchet wrench that has a bit holder for a Phillips head screw (all the other screws in the structure were Torx). Once we removed the 3 screws we hoped we could just push the top structure back and then lift the microwave. But that didn't work. We were not sure why it would not move as we could not see anything that might be holding it. Note that there is only about 5 cm of clearance at the top.

We decided that it must just be friction holding it, so we applied brute force to the vertical support and it finally started to budge, but not as well as I thought it would. It finally pushed to the back of the cabinet after repeated blows, and we got the microwave out.

However we found there were two more screws about halfway back that were holding the top structure in place and they scraped the top of the inside of the cabinet as we were pounding it back. There was no way we could have reached those screws even if we had seen them.

I don't know if there is a secret trick to getting this out that we missed. But if not then I don't know what Lagoon was thinking when the put this together. It would certainly hold the microwave steady in any conditions, but did not seem to consider removal for repair in the design.

And we found that Lagoon had not removed the plastic shipping cover from the microwave. They had just made some openings in the plastic by some of the vents (a bit more than half)

Now we need to figure out how to put it back together.

[Catapault]

Not exactly maintenance friendly....

I'll shortly be replacing the MW on my 2011 L450. Will see if its as much pain. Thanks for the photo's.

[Rickthesailor]

Hi,

I got the Microwave fixed... turned out to be a fuse...

However the removal and re-install of the microwave was not easy...

The re-install required putting the microwave and the overhead structure in at the same time as the overhead structure is too large to fit in after the microwave is installed... Since the top opening was too small to hold the wood in place by hand, I tied it off with some cord and then taped it to the front of the microwave... then pulled the top support into place once everything was inside the opening...

See pics...