Only ten years ago, I carried the picture of this pair to the bakery in Rockville, MD to have the picture transferred to the icing on the sheet cake we had at the 2002 Wash-In, little suspecting that this beautiful pair would be found. The cabinets are totally unlike any other Westinghouse cabinet we've seen with texturized steel, similar to, but not the same as, what manufacturers used for refrigerator doors. There must have been a special coating under the paint or a special type of paint because there is no rust around the door opening on the washer or anywhere on the door and anyone who has any experience with Laundromats knows they are very vulnerable to rust in those areas.
John lifted the top and we got to see how the softener drains down into a small hose connected to the plastic fill flume. At the last rinse, a solenoid lowers the hose so that the softener drains into the flume as the water flys past. None of it looked used. I had not touched the dispenser since 1959 in the Davison's store in Atlanta. It is hard to imagine filling it and then turning it over to place in the machine without wiping up softener on the bottom plug. It is definitely not something that could be filled from a gallon or maybe even a full quart jug unless you rested the jug on something and poured very carefully & slowly. You have to hold the spring-loaded plug down to pour in the softener. Once the clear container is placed into the little black plastic box in the machine, the softener would immediately drain out of the clear plastic holder into the black plastic box in which it sits and then into the hose through an opening in one corner. It is a dispenser system that would take a lot of not-so-easy-to-do cleaning to keep from being gunked up, even with non-concentrated softeners like Sta-Puf, let alone concentrated types like Nu-Soft. There is no way of drying the inside of the clear plastic so the absence of water spots probably means it was never used. There is nothing, however, preventing the user from removing the clear reservoir, pouring softener directly into the black box and then flushing it with hot water during the last rinse fill if using the dispensing system and keeping it clean was a priority.
The washer has bad bearings and some other issues to be fixed. If anyone has replaced bearings in a Laundromat, you know it is a loud procedure to bang out old bearings and bang in new ones. John said that if it is needed, he still had a tub shaft which, in these machines just screws onto the back of the tub since they only turn in one direction.
