Rick, Welcome to the group. It's funny that you should mention solid tub Norge washers. I was just thinking this morning about a neighbor who had worn out an early 50s Kenmore and replaced it with a GE from maybe 1960. It had the plastic filter pan that covered the top of the agitator. One day while I was watching it wash for the first time, I commented on it not having spray rinses in the spin between the wash and rinse. She said that she had noticed that also, but that even without them, the rinse water was much clearer in the GE than in the Kenmore. Then I thought about some washer report or rating from long ago that said that one of the benefits of solid tub machines was that they generally rinsed better.
I remember a Norge demonstration that a salesman was giving to two potential customers in our downtown Rich's Department Store. The machine was full of water and agitating when he reached up and took two or three pop-up facial tissues and dropped them in the swirling and surging water. Within less than a minute, the agitator was puking tissue fragments into the filter pan and the ladies were impressed. Lint was something that became an issue with automatic washers, especially the agitator type. Having the water drain away from the clothes was the culprit. With a wringer washer, the clothes were lifted out of the wash water, leaving the lint behind. There was not much lint generated in the hand rinsing and any that might be present was allowed to settle to the bottom of the tub when the clothes were picked up to go through the wringer. You did not want to wash good dark clothes in linty wash water from all of the lighter colored laundry, but things like my grandfather's overalls were always washed last and I don't remember any lint problem with them. Besides, most of it would blow away in the breeze as the clothes were hanging on the lines.
