International Harvester Refrigerators and Freezers
Made some great refs and freezers, IH invented and patented the way they made the steel liners for their chest freezers, they took a huge sheet of steel welded into a band and did a continuous weld of steel tubing to the outside of this band of steel. Then they bent it into a rectangular shape and welded a bottom on to it, then the whole thing was sprayed with powered porclean and fired in an oven at around 1500F degrees.
Whirlpool bough IH in the mid 1950s and continued to build chest freezers this way through the 80s, WPs and Sears chest freezers were the best built freezers by a long shot during this time period. WP also bought also bought Seeger refrigeration in the mid 1950s and this is where they got the Seeger designed rotary compressor, WP continued to use this compressor design into the mid 1980s and incorporated it in nearly all refs, freezers small A/Cs and 50LB IMs. My brother Jeff and I among others consider this Seeger Rotary Compressor to be by far the best compressor ever used in a home ref or freezer. They NEVER wore out or lost any pumping capacity unlike a piston compressor and you could a unplug a running refrigerator and plug it right back in and the compressor would restart instantly.
These compressors were also virtually silent in operation, it was always hard to tell if it was running if the ref had even a condenser fan running.
I had a funny warranty call on a new WP ref in about 1980 where the customer said that her new WP refrigerator was too noisy. It was a basic model with a condenser on the back. After looking over the new ref that was barely humming I explained that there was probably no ref made that was any quieter than this ref, and I asked her what kind of ref she had before, and she said it was also a WP. Then I noticed that there was a recently capped gas line behind the new ref and we determined that she had had a gas WP gas ref, and I could understand why even the slight hum of the new one was noisy to her, LOL.
