Phil;

I would agree with Eric that by taking it apart, cleaning and lubing on reassembly, you likely freed up something which was hung up. The trick is during disassembly to carefully inspect so that you fully understand how its supposed to function normally, and what might have been not quite right...unfortunately you missed that this time, so now are not certain of what changed and was inadvertently "corrected" on reassembly...but the bottom line is its "fixed" and works, so can't argue with that...!

As far as the Resilex piece, I believe you are referring to the fiber spacing washer...I think its function is to maintain the correct height and position of the stack of components, and act as a thrust bearing surface, so unless you can figure out its function and make the call that its not needed, I'd probably replace it (it was surely in there for a valid reason!) ...and if Eric, the highly experience mechanic whose judgement is based on a lot of experience, used to leave it out when broken, I'm sure he inspected its function and thought about it long and hard before making that judgement call to simply grease the bearing area instead...I'm sure that he replaces them now that they are available again...

Cheers