Many years ago, the latch on our dishwasher broke. I tore it apart enough to determine that it wasn't an easy fix and tacked it back together again.

This model dishwasher is well known as being nice and quiet, but not known for actually cleaning dishes. We found it succeeded admirably in the category of not cleaning dishes.

Carol and I discussed this and concluded that it wasn't worth the major effort of repairing a dishwasher that doesn't wash dishes anyhow. We looked into getting a new one, and never found one we liked enough to drop the exorbitant number of bucks to get one that's known to work.

And with just two of us, there weren't a lot of dishes to wash.

And so, for the past several years, the dishwasher has been used for storing plastic storage containers.

Last week, for reasons best known to the machine, it started running. With the door open.

Luckily, I was nearby and discouraged this behavior before there was too much water on the floor.

But this encouraged me to look into repairing it. It turns out that the replacement latch is just $30, and a YouTube video assured me that the job would take about five minutes.

These statements both turned out to be accurate, but remember, a few paragraphs back, I mentioned that I just tacked the thing back together some six or eight years ago. I didn't bother replacing all the Torx-headed 5/8 inch sheet metal screws.

I'm guessing that those screws were put in a safe place. They are certainly safe from me.

Needless to say, I had no Torx headed sheet metal screws in my various collections of repair parts. I didn't even have any traditional headed 5/8 inch sheet metal screws. Mine were all either 1/2 inch or 3/4.

So, search online. You can buy official replacement screws for a Whirlpool Quiet 300 for just $5.00 each.

Umm, yeah. Not likely.

Strangely enough, nobody (not even Amazon) seems to have truss head, Torx, sheet metal screws in 5/8 inch length. The next closest thing I could find was a security screw with a post inside the Torx head.

So, a trip to Lowes and about six dollars later I had a couple dozen Philips headed sheet metal screws that work just fine.

Aside from using a part that the average homeowner doesn't have tools for, I don't see any reason for using a Torx head sheet-metal screw in the first place. It's not an application where you're applying so many pounds of torque that you need to worry about stripping a Phillips or even a straight screw.

In the end, except for several hours looking for the lost screws, more hours searching the net, and a couple hours of running to Lowes, and then Meijer's as long as I was in the area, and Busch's on the way home, it was a ten minute repair job.

And, the dishwasher works just as well as it ever did: poorly.