Fridgiman, here is something that you can try to clean the mildew smell out of your GE. Buy the medium or large size bottle of a gel-type dishwasher detergent containing chlorine. Set your water heater to produce the hottest water possible, at least 140 and bleed off any cold water in the pipes before starting to fill the washer with hot water. Empty the dw detergent into the washer and let it agitate on high speed for the longest wash setting the NORMAL cycle allows. When it stops agitating, remove the drain hose from the standpipe or tub and arrange it so that it empties back into the washer. You might want to remove the FF pan to eliminate the chance for spashing back. Hold the U-shaped end into the washer with a towel or something that will insulate your hand from the heat. Let the washer start to drain and let it run for a minute before shutting it off. What you are trying to do is have the water scrub the areas above the water line for a longer period than usual during drain. Now let the machine sit for about 20 minutes. If you have a thin scrubbing pad like one of the pads made by 3M, you can reach behind the vinyl shroud around the opening and try to scrub any places you can reach unless you have done this in your initial clean up of the machine. After the 20 minutes, replace the filter pan then let the washer drain and go through the cycle with a warm rinse and it should smell better. The dishwasher detergent is better than plain bleach for a few reasons. First, it has powerful detergents and second it has chemicals that protect the machine parts from the chlorine and the alkaline components and three, you can get a really concentrated cleaning solution without lots of sudsing. I hope that this helps.
Toggle, Clothes are not that likely to fall from the side of a top loader washer tub after they have been spun for a few minutes. Remember, it is a solid tub washer so the water is spun out of the tub within a minute, but the outer tub is not pumped dry for another 2 minutes or so. That means that the load has been spun way beyond heavy, dripping wet weight. As for the suds killing. As you know GE Filter Flo washers were easily over sudsed. In the solid tub machines, this suds could escape over the side of the inner tub with the water that overflowed the tub into the outer tub (and kept the Filter Flo supplied) instead of overflowing the cabinet like the perforated tub machines. If suds had accumulated in the outer tub and then the wash water was dumped into the outer tub, the spinning of the inner tub could make for some real foam between the tubs. By having the tub stop and rest while the timer advanced, the foam that was in the outer tub would have a chance to run down into the sump and get away from the spinning inner tub which had helped whip up the froth. It must have been effective because neighbors who went from Kenmores to solid tub GEs remarked that, in spite of no spray rinses in the spin between wash and rinse, there were far fewer suds when the rinse started agitating in the GEs than in the Kenmores. One of the washer tests in the 50s mentioned that solid tub machines had the edge in rinsing.
