18 Pounds ? Toms reaction was the same as mine when I read that. With the indexing wash tub and a ramp style agitator these washers struggled to turn over large loads, yes they actually did pretty well with light loads.

WH TL washers from the time they started making them in the later half of the 1960s were always throw away washers in the repair trade. After WH worked out a lot of initial problems and got these working fairly well they sold out to WCI around 1975 and up to and especially after this time the cost of replacement parts were threw the roof so it made most repairs just not worth it. I always said their were only two parts that were worth replacing on a WH TL washer, the inlet valve and the belt. Just about any other problem was too expensive to fix, a timer was over a $120 for just the part, if any thing happened to the water pump [ which was assembled on top of the motor ] it usually took the motor out with it, very expensive and if the transmission had any problem at all this repair literately did cost as much or more than the washer cost. Like GE WH had a lot of transmission oil seal leaks at the bottom shaft seal, but unlike GE who offered an economical remanufactured transmission that could be installed in under a half an hour you faced a two hour job with parts costs of over $150. And this was the 1970s-1980s so needless to say very few WH TL washers ever got new transmissions and a lot of these washers were retired early. The only washers worst than these in this time period were the things already comming from WCI under the Kelvinator and Gibson labels.

But every once and a while you would see a WHTL washer that did manage to last upwards of 20 years or so and after WCI merged these two designs and got their quality control together they did build a lot of TL washers that were not as problem prone and some put in pretty respectable lives, but all the way to the end of the Frigidaire TL washers I never saw a single one that was worth the effort to replace the main seal, main bearings or transmission on, except in the case of the 24" and 27" stacks where the higher cost of replacing the complete machine sometimes made the repair make sense.