Peter, Other than Philco, that downsized the Bendix combo and not totally for the better, only Whirlpool, through the huge number of combos sold through Sears, could afford to totally redesign the machine. The initial costs of tooling up to manufacture the combos were a financial investment on which most companies did not see a profitable return and with Philco-Bendix holding the most important patents on the concept of a washer-dryer combination, even continuing production was almost not worth the trouble. Once the stories began to circulate of compromised performance and the deep, mostly unrequited, attachment some combinations formed with their service technicians, sales dropped each year after 1958 or 59. Some manufacturers spent money on cosmetic changes like keeping the control panels contemporary with the rest of their laundry line, but underneath they were largely the same machines. I guess that in the soured market, no one had the resources to take on AVCO with all of their millions of millions from defense contracts, but it would almost seem like they very successfully stifled competion and infringed on trade for that whole invention. When you consider the power of patents, we're lucky that we had so many different brands of automatic washers. Even without infringing on AVCO's patents, every other manufacturer paid AVCO/Bendix a royalty on every combination built because AVCO had the idea first. Whirlpool still uses their patents to fight others when it looks like features they patented around 50 years ago are being used today. The story of combos was, unfortunately, like the stories of so many love affairs; they hit their peak with the first shot and nothing that came later could match it.