Tappan Dishwasher POD Nov 16, 2010

[maytagbear]

Does anyone know how this machine worked? The ad copy implied to me that there wasn't a motor. Did it work on water pressure, like the Carocelle? If it did operate on water pressure, it would need a firehose. How did the dirty water exit the machine---was there a pump? How did the controls operate?

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Lawrence/Maytagbear

 

[tomturbomatic]

No, there was a motor that turned a big black roller that ran from front to back under the middle of the bottom rack. The theory of operation was that the roller picked up water like a tire does on wet pavement. I guess if you put your dishes out on the street in the rain and let cars and trucks run over them you would get about as satisfactory a washing job. There were two detergent holders at the front of the lower rack on each side. The first time it filled, the roller turned in one direction and sprayed water over the load and the detergent dispenser on one side of the upper and lower racks. The next time it filled the roller turned in the other direction. Then it rinsed the same way. It was the most heartbreaking thing because it was a beautiful and quiet machine, but it would not remove smashed potatoes from a plate. Like so many other things in life, the biggest control panels don't mean the best performance.

 

[appnut]

Tom, you are abbsolutely correct in everything you said. Our house we moved into September 1961 had an O'Keefe & Merrit version of a basic builder model. It was removed and replaced with our 1960 Waste King before we moved in and that other dishwasher was put in our old house. My Godfather's family moved into a new house in 1963 with the basic model version of this. One dial with Rinse & Hold, Normal, Short, and Plate Warmer cycles. When it washed, it literally sounded just like the tires on a car as it's going down a wet freeway or expressway. Pretty pathetic at washing. My memory of the dishwasher is a little bit fuzzy regarding the racking--I was always far more intersted in the WO65-2 in the laundry alcove. What I'm fuzzy about with rackintg is this. The POD picture appeas to have a top rack that was fully usable all the way across and it looks like the racks moved independently of each other. I vaguely seem to remember the basic model had a rack that had both top & bottom racks all tied together with somewhat of an opened top rack to allow loading of the bottom rack. Top rack capacity was pretty dismal then.

 

[combo52]

TAPPAN DISHWASHER

In 1982 we removed a DW like the one on POD machine from a house in Bethesda Md. that was never used.I had just purchased a weekend house in Harpers Ferry WV. and wanted a DW for the dinning area of the house which was one level up from the kitchen. I though that this might make a good machine for this purpose, I knew that it would be helpless at washing pots and pans etc and installed a WP power Clean in the main kitchen. So I hooked the Tappan up in the shop at home and tried washing several loads of lightly soiled dishes. It was a total cleaning failure it moved the food from one side of the machine to the other. As Tom described it had four water changes per cycle two washes one in each direction and two rinses again one in each direction. I wish now that I had saved it for the museum so people could see the crazy things that were tried.

 

[tomturbomatic]

Tappan keeps on reversing

To keep Tappan's idea of reversing washing action alive, this fiasco was replaced by a D&M machine which had a spring mechanism on the lower wash arm. It was called Reverse-A-Jet. As the water spray turned the arm, a spring was wound tight. At some point, the tightened spring overcame the directional force of the water and the wash arm spun in the opposite direction until said spring was unwound. It certainly washed better than the first Tappan design. Whether the reversing made any difference is unknown.

 

[combo52]

TAPPAN REVERSING ARM DISHWASHER

The Tappan [ I think it was called Reversa-Jet ] dishwasher had two sets of propulsion holes in both ends of the lower wash arm and as Tom was describing it would turn so many revolutions in one direction as a little SS spring would wind up and finally cause little SS shutters inside the ends of the arm to flip closing one set of holes and opening the other which caused the arm too reverse. These dishwashers had a plastica-sol tub like the earlier Tappans being decussed and the machine was actually made by Tappan, The D&M Tappans came a little later and did not have the reversing lower arm any longer.

 

[bajaespuma]

This is a cool vintage oddball

I'd love to get my hands on one of these. It's washing performance wouldn't have been a problem in our house as my Mom hand washed every knife and fork that went into the pull-out. Did it at least have hot enough temperatures to sanitize everything? To paraphrase Joan Crawford, "If you stick a dish into a box with lots of hot water, what's to keep it from getting clean?"