Ok, it might not be the bearing. But rotating the drums sounds very rough and on the spin cycle the machine makes a hell of a noise.

I removed one of the lifters and there doesn’t seem to be anything trapped between the inner drum and the outer.

I found the service manual and says it’s a non splitable drum assembly, which probably means a welded plastic outer drum which will doubtless means it’ll be a nightmare to split let alone reseal. And even then I don’t know for certain that it’s the bearings.

New machine time?

Yep pretty much. When the bearings went in my old hotpoint I trawled the internet trying to figure out a fix – turned out for the want of a tenner’s worth of bearings I’d need to spend £65ish for an entirely new drum – and being me, probably a whole weekend trying to install it. Learned my lesson and spent big on a machine that I will be able to fix next time.

Such a waste of a repairable machine – it’s criminal that these things are made so that they’re not worth fixing.