The Blackstone
Barry,
I am not a Blackstone expert; though I have operated one before. Jetcone is probably the resident expert as I believe he is one of two members that has one. The one I operated as a teenager appeared to be of the same vintage as Jetcones.
Though my interest in automatic laundry appliances began while I was snatching crumbs, my engineer/design/mechanic
genes never fully developed! The Blackstone has your basic
agitator design; I can't recall if it has three blades or four. The center post is rather substantial; 3 to 4 inches in diameter, and the typical length. The inner wash basket is, I believe, stainless steel, not a real heavy gauge. ( I could be all wrong, some one will correct me if I am!) So the wash basket is a sheet of stainless steel.( I'm talking about just the sides, not the bottom) So I think in the course of manufacture this sheet of stainless steel is ( the sheet is sized so that if you bent the ends of least length to meet each other they would form a cylinder, [think of a coffee can opened on both ends], so this sheet of light gauge steel is
actually greater in length than the diameter of the wash basket) ok, when they set about to creat the basket of the Blackstone, this sheet of stainless is put throuh a Brake,
or perhaps it's called a press, or maybe it's a little bit of both. The sheet of steel is pleated, if you will. Really it's
kind of double pleated, except that every other two creases, or folds in the steel is two separate but uniform lengths.
Am I making any sense? I should probably say widths, not lengths. This is what creates the appearance of strips of cloth. They are indeed strips, but not of cloth, but of pleated stainless steel. It has been close to forty years since I used the Blackstone that I mentioned. There may be a slight variation in the pleat narrative,the smaller sections
may uniformally vary in their widths from the top of the basket to the bottom, in which case those two variations would be staggered. In my callow youth, I was not aware that in order to facilitate the neutral drain feature of this par-
ticular model, a certain eletromechanical operation slightly raises the agitator , kind of like pushing the drain rod down
on your more fancy bathroom lavatories! If you are lucky enough to be attending the convention, maybe Jetcone will bring his, or maybe Gansky has one. imho the Blackstone is
one of the most asthetically appealing of the vintage automatic washing machines. This took me much longer than it should have; I hope it makes sense and no one else has slipped in a more conscise explanation! I forgot to mention; the agitators, I think, were made of "pot metal"
