more info...
Hi all and thanks for the well-wishes on the new baby! It is a beauty and I'm very lucky to have one in such nice condition. I wired a cord to it last night - 30A/240v - and fired it up. There were two distinct squeals, more like screams, from the mechanism. One was from the pump and the other was the blower pulley rubbing against the transmission housing. I suspect the previous owner used it mostly as a dryer so there is probably lots of lint and hard water scale from the condenser system jammed in the pump and around the blower and baffle system. Maytag used an interesting method for their "Sealed In Climate" condenser dryers, it has a blower spinning at 2150 rpm which a stream of water is directed to at the rate of approx. 3 1/2 pints per minute. When that stream of water hits that spinning fan/blower, it gets smashed apart and creates a mist effect to condense the warm moisture being drawn in from the drum. The cooled, dry air is then directed back through the heating elements and into the drum. This same design was also used in their condenser stand-alone dryers up until the introduction of the '06' models in 1966. The good news is that the transmission seems to work fine in tumble and spin modes although judging by the years-old oil mess on the base plate, looks like it needs to be refilled with oil.
The controls for the washer are fairly straightforward, there is a chime that sounds at the end of the wash phase and again at the end of the drying phase when Wash & Wear is selected and there is no heating of the clothes during the final spin on the W&W or Delicate cycles. W&W defaults to cold rinsing no matter what wash temp is chosen. There is a spray rinse and three deep rinses, the timed fab. softener dispenser is activated in the final rinse of all cycles. The bleach dispenser is a simple holding tank that is flushed in the main wash and emptied during drain (connected to sump). The dryer timer is the small tab on the control dial which selects the drying time after the wash cycle.
I found the service manual for this model 340W combo on ebay a while back so I'm also very lucky to have all this information. Even though it's in good cosmetic condition, I'll still have to disassemble it to make sure the blower/condenser assembly is clean and inspect/repair the pump, etc. which will probably all add up to no small job. I'm anxious to see it running (there is a tub light that will undoubtedly be wired "on" whenever the machine is running ;-) so I will take pics all along the journey to it's first load.
