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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 [i]will[/i] 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.