Answers to some questions
I found a classified ad in the early 80s for a Kenmore washer-dryer combination. John called the guy and went and brought it home. The guy was a military electrician and said that he could not make it work. Well, he had a hot line connected to the neutral terminal on the machine. The machine worked fine, except for the awful tangling. You see, these were not just regular fins like you would expect in a tumbler washer. The Kenmore and Whirlpool combos had these 3 big balance tanks that were almost 50% of the tub circumferance and about 1.5 to 2 inches high. They were meant to tumble the load in the wash stream. The dynamics of running them through deep water was pretty wild. Anyway, John finally sold it to someone in a condo where it replaced a GE combo. Like the other 29" combos, it had a big round window. All of our combos were wired so that the tub light stays on while the machine is on for prime viewing, but this model did not have the tub light.
Austin, John has the first of the 29" combos. He sorta found it in pieces and it's still in his basement, but he does not use it since it is electric and up til now gas has been cheaper to use for drying clothes. This winter might change that. I do not remember if it was converted or what. I think it was, but it still had the filter in the sump. He showed it to me more than 20 years ago. The deep fill combo was of the 29" style. I do not know how many years it was offered. It was discontinued a year or so before the Lady
John has the big 33" kenmore combo with the rectangular window. Ever since I started telling people here about my fascination with appliances and happened to mention combos, various individuals would tell me about this combo in a big church downtown. It was in the kitchen and after various functions, it was loaded with kitchen towels and started. I don't remember the name of the church, but one day at lunch a guy who worked in an office near mine wanted to go to this church because of something to do with work that was being done on the pipe organ. On the way, I said that I wanted to try to see this combo I had heard about. Well, we could not get in to see about the organ work, but I found a door to the building where the kitchen should be and it was unlocked. As I opened the door, I saw that I was two or three floors above the lower level where the kitchen would be. I was going to the glance down the stairwell to see if there were any traces of a kitchen, but when I reached the railing, I looked down and there in the corner of the stairway, three floors down was the Lady, all disconnected. I made good time getting down to where the maintenance supervisor's office was. I introduced myself and asked about the combo. Yes, it had been taken out of service because it was leaking, no, nobody was going to do anything with it, yes, the church would accept a donation for letting me carry it off. I told John about it, but he had to go work on his mountain place that weekend. Jeff volunteered to drive down and help get it out of the place and Bob Wirth was happy to come along also and help us up the 5 stairs to the sidewalk. So we brought it home. It had a very bad leak in a pump seal, but John looked at it and said that it was the same seal that was used in a 17 series KitchenAid pump and in no time he had the leak stopped. Now, in that machine, but not in the WP, outside the top of the outer tank there was a bright tub light over a piece of glass that, while it had to shine through the holes in the drum, gave quite a good light to help you see what was happening inside. This is the machine that had two timers and there is a setting on the dry timer for Wash Only that gave 20 minutes of high heat drying to make washed only loads just a little less wet than if you took them out after the 225rpm spin. This combo also had the provision of being used on a 50 amp circuit which allowed another dryer heating element to be put online to give around 8,000 Watts of drying heat. It had Hot, Medium, Warm and Cold wash settings but it did not have the special fill valve that mixed warm and hot to get medium. If you selected Medium wash water, it filled with warm and turned on the immersion water heater and held the timer until the water had reached the right temperature. If the Hot water was less than 120, it would hold the timer while the water was heated. Oh my gosh, I just realized that you could do a profile wash in this machine by setting it to fill with cold and then turning the wash temp switch to Hot! These were not puny heaters either. The Duomatic's Magic heater which came on for the Hot wash was 3500 Watts. As to how Bendix Duomatics dealt with vibration from high speed spins: Bendix had the whole Duomatic mechanism suspended from springs and supported by two shock absorbers so that it could spin clothes at just over 500 rpm. They patented that and nobody else could do that. That is why the cabinet was 36 inches wide; to give the mechanism sufficient space to swing and to accommodate the shocks, springs and weights. That's the reason that other combos extract so poorly; they had no way of dealing with the dynamic forces of a tub spinning at high speed with a less than perfectly balanced load on a horizontal axis so they had to keep the speed down, or do like the 29" Whirlpool-made machines, keep a few gallons in the bottom of the machine before the 400 rpm spin and use them to supply the tanks that would balance the load as well as to give the machine some extra weight in the center of the base. That is why it sounds so different when it drains after the third rinse. All of the other drain periods have the sound of the solenoid snapping the diverter valve from recirculate to drain and you hear the water pump out and it spins and you hear the valve snap back into recirculate when the spin begins to slow to the tumble speed and it starts filling for another rinse. At the end of the third rinse, you hear the diverter valve snap open and some water rush down the drain then a sudden snap and the water stops draining because the machine has drained to below the bottom of the drum and at the same time, the front diverter valve changes the direction of the recirculating water so that instead going through the Filter Stream spray into the clothing, it is routed to the water spray for the balance ring. Depending on the model, the machine either goes through about 5 minutes of hesitation spins at low speed alternated with tumbling periods or it goes right into a high speed spin attempt. It is during the attempt at high speed spin that the balancing takes place. The drum is traveling in a clockwise direction. When the heavy side of an unbalanced load reaches the 9 to 11 o'clock position, it causes the frame to flex. That flex is transmitted to a little metal flag which is pushed into the stream of water that is spraying at the balance ring at the outside front of the drum. The little flag interrupts the downward spray of the water so that some of it is thrown toward the opening of one or two of the tanks. At the same time as the water is diverted into a tank, the air pressure which is trying to inflate the air-driven clutches is bled off in one of the little ffft sounds. As the tub gets more and more balanced, there are fewer and fewer ffft sounds so more air can inflate the clutches and then, if it all works right and the load can be balanced, the speed levels off at 400 rpm. Of course even then things can go wrong. A little piece of lint can get caught in the little flag mechanism causing a small amount of the water spray to be deflected toward the ring that fills the tanks and after a minute or so of high speed spinning, you start hearing the airbleeding sound and the tub starts slowing down. This is a nasty thing to have happen because it means that you have to take the front of the cabinet off and sometimes both sides so that you can go into the front of the outer tub where the trouble is. John & Jeff's brother Jerry once counted up the number of parts for the Lady Kenmore combo and realized that the total was the same as for a Volkswagon Beetle--1600. That's complexity.
