They were made by : Riber = RIccardo BERtolino

The company seems to have just disappeared out of the mainstream market for laundry appliances in the late 1970s.

I think there was a lot of consolidation around then though and quite a large number of smaller European white goods companies just disappeared entirely.

Usually when a company's doing 'white label' products for other brands, it's a sign that it's not doing so well at marketing its own products and don't have the economies of scale. If you consider the Antonio Merloni machines etc.. those companies didn't really make enough money because they didn't have full control of the marketing and were competing with other companies that do similar white-label machines for rebagging. In Europe, they were up against Turkish companies like Arçelik (yes, they really care called that and thankfully have the good sense to be called BEKO in most markets!) and Chinese manufactures.

It looks like Riber put a lot of development into that series of washer-dryers though. They were excellent machines for that era. I would suspect when the washer-dryer concept went more main-stream, you just saw the major brands taking over entirely in the 1980s. So, all of a sudden there were Hotpoints, Hoovers, Indesits, Aristons etc in their respective major markets and Riber and it's re-badgers no longer had that niche all to themselves and just fizzled out.

It looks like Indesit and Ariston had some connection to that 850XD family of machines too and were definitely selling them at one stage or derivatives of them.

I wonder did they just buy the manufacturing plant and IP from Riber and use it as a basis for their own machines?

Coleston actually collapsed in 1964, so any use of the name after that was by other companies anyway.

So, it looks like Ariston which had taken over the Coleston brand by the late 1970s was using it to sell washer dryers it was bringing in from Riber, which it may have owned by then too.

I have no idea what the Thor brand was here in Ireland though. It was quite commonly seen in the late 70s and early 80s on a lot of products and it doesn't seem to be anything to do with the current incarnation of Thor which is a budget brand.

The old range included stuff like the 850XD and 950XD. I've seen the brand on pretty high quality cooker hoods and other items like that from that era too.

Motor wiring :

That wiring actually looks heat damaged rather than just old.

I notice that the fan blades appear to have a crack near the rotor shaft. Is that still attached firmly? That could be why the wires are brittle - the motor may have been overheating for years.

Late 1970s wiring sheathing would have been pretty similar to modern insulation. It's unlikely it should have just become brittle like that age. I would suspect that motor ran quite hot during the spin cycles.

There are a few specialist motor rewind companies around who could probably take it apart and completely rebuild it for you but, it would be quite pricy.

In reality, that's not very different to a small industrial motor and quite unlike brush motors normally associated with domestic washing machines of that era.

I would guess that if they were buying motors from Romania in those days, they were probably getting very high spec, much, much cheaper than they'd have been able to buy in Italy.

I'm guessing from the stamp, that machine's from about 1981. The motor looks to be stamped with 11 80.. Assume that could be November 1980.

Final tip:

ASBESTOS WARNING

That pinkish panel over the fan/heater assembly for the dryer is quite possible that it could be asbestos. I would be VERY wary of disturbing that too much as it could be brittle.

It's the one thing that would put me off getting too up close and personal with some appliances of that era.