Steve, I hated that ring, but remember saving it for a while after we sold the washer when we bought the 58LK. It seemed like such a disfiguring thing in the machine and no other machine had anything like it. It only fit the pregnant Roto Swirls so I don't imagine they were manufactured for very long. Looking back, I guess it was somewhat stylish with the slightly raised collar around the agitator, the gently sloping polished smooth upper surface that tapered to a curved edge contrasting with the flat less finished underside. By the time I really became aware of it, we had moved to Georgia and no longer had the stone set tubs. The sewer line in the new house went out several feet above the floor so no sinks in the basement. Because of all of the granite under ground, it was too expensive to blast down through it to lay the sewer lines deeper. We lived many miles from Stone Mountain, but still had layers of granite in the ground. On top of that, the builders were not really sure about building houses with what they called "Yankee basements." Most houses has the washer hookups in the kitchen. When we first moved to Decatur, we rented a house with a laundry room off the kitchen while our new house was being built. Daddy went to Sears and bought a square tub on legs with wheels. It was galvanized on the inside, painted white on the outside, had a shelf between the legs near the floor and it had a cover. Oh, and a drain valve on the bottom. This was for the sudsaver in both houses. After a couple of years the suds valve started leaking so my parents had it removed, but that did not keep mom from saving the wash water. When my parents had first bought the Kenmore, we lived in in a house with oil heat and electric water heating so the sudsaver was a real money saver, but even while they lived in that house, daddy had gas run to the house so that a gas water heater could be installed. Our house outside of Decatur had a gas water heater as well, so the sudsaver was no longer a must, plus without a real drain connecting the tub to the sewer line, the gray hose had to be lifted out of the tub and put in the standpipe to drain the last wash water. After the suds valve was removed, the washer no longer had the gray suds hose, just the black drain hose. We had several floods when mom would forget to move the drain hose from the tub to the standpipe for the rinse water after she started a load of laundry and got distracted. When it worked according to plan, she had her tub of saved water and used a 2 quart copper bottom EKCO-Flint saucepan to bail the water if no one was around with enough strength to use a pail. It was after the suds valve was removed that we took the ring out of the washer since water was not being pumped back into the machine.
Between the time of the single speed sudsaver washers and after the introduction of recirculating lint filters, Whirlpool made an agitator-mounted lint filter that scouped up water into the filter. I guess that this could have been a later solution to the splashing with the Roto Swirl if someone lost the ring or something. A lower end Kenmore would not have had the RS agitator anyway, but on the off chance someone had a second hand early model KM with sudsaver, that lint filter maybe could have been used in place of the ring to help with the splashing.
