Notice the suspension by cables. The old solid tub design used a similar system, but the tub was solid so only enough water to slightly overflow the tub was used and the tub could swing about as much as was needed during spin. In the new design, the inner basket or tub is still held in place by the cables, but its wiggle room for coping with unbalanced loads was inside the outer tub. That is why there is so much room between the inner and outer tub in the perforated basket design and why they took so much water to wash a nominal load of laundry. Speaking of off-balance loads, the GE would spin or try to spin no matter what. In more than a few cases, the angle of the transmission's gyration is so great that the spinning pulls the big seal in the outer tub loose and flooding starts the next time the washer fills.

Thanks Tom!

Across the laundry room, till it hit the folding table, just short of pulling it's own plug when it went off balance and no one was quick enough to run down there.. funny I had forgotten that till this came up today.
What a racket it made too...

Good times.

Love that term "wiggle Room" is that an official GE Term LOL

If GE put a slightly bigger tub in the same cabinet and beefed up the suspension, that would of been a far superior washing machine to the redesigned one unleashed upon us all.

Gack arrroohhh, do you have those ghastly redesigned things over there too?

This particular machine was a very handsome design; pity it was only used for a very short time.

The old GEs aren't bad machines save for the unfortunate way in which they attempt to handle unbalanced loads. You can avoid it most of the time however if you're careful with your loading.

We have one Filter Flo coinop in my apt. complex, that I really like. I hope it never wears out. Oddly, the filter water spout is located in the lower left corner of the machine rather than the rear right (or rear center in the case of some of the older models). I think it rinses in warm water when you wash in hot, because the clothes are always toasty when you remove them (unless our cold water is really that warm in this climate).

Scott the reason the filter flo spout is located where it is on the old coin op GE's is because those machines are actually "front service" as opposed to the rear access only of the home models. So the mechanics are set up so everything is reachable through the front. At least that is what I was told by my local GE dealer a long time ago.

I agree that most unbalanced loads on those machines could be controlled somewhat by careful loading. That was my experience with our GE - and when there was a real off balance load, we have a split level style house so the laundry room wasn't all that far away and you could get to the machine before it got out of control.