8/30/16 POD 1970's Commercial Frigidaires

[toploadloyalist]

Does anyone have close-up shots of the selector buttons atop the coin slots of those washers and dryers?

 

[frigilux]

A brochure on Frigidaire's commercial line is available for purchase in Ephemera. Unfortunately, this is the best shot of the controls. Get out your magnifying glass and put on your cycle imagination hat, LOL!

 

[appnut]

There were 5 of these machines in the laundry room of my first apartment in college.  There were the 5 wash/rinse temp combos and the 3 speed combos--N/N, N/S, and S/S. 

 

[brucelucenta]

There was another commercial machine which had a different backsplash and had the solid tub along with the little glass insert lid. That model was the more common one in laundromats. The models like this one shown were perforated tub models.

 

[vintagekenmore]

The Helpee Selfee laundry up the street from us had one row of these newer machines and the rest were the turquoise blue ones with the round glass window in the lid. It also had the big Cissel dryers lining two walls, the newer washers seemed to be out of service more than their older counterparts for some reason.

 

[brucelucenta]

The two laundries I knew of that had these machines had replaced the multimatic rapidry 1000 machines with them. They too were harvest gold and the old ones were turquoise with the square glass insert. The older ones were at least 10 years old when they replaced them, the newer ones didn't last very long, about 4 or 5 years. By then Frigidaire had sold out to White-Westinghouse. One of the laundries in an apartment building replaced the last Frigidaire machines with Whirlpool belt drive machines. The other laundry closed down. It led me to believe those machines didn't hold up well in service. I know that vandalism was a problem too, some of the instructions printed where the buttons for water and speed were torn off too. One interesting thing I noticed when working on one of the older turquoise machines is that there was a plastic coated wire basket under the inner tub to catch anything that might spin over the top of the tub and plug up the drain. Every machine like that I worked on had several pair of plastic baby pants on the top of them among other things.