Thank you; good information!

Funnily enough, the Canadian-made GE dishwashers had porcelain tubs right into the late 1980s.  My folks had a 1978 GE Contessa portable and my first house had a 1988 GE Potscrubber II, both of which had porcelain tubs.   I have a feeling that the Canadian models were all based on the Hotpoint design (store brands Beaumark, and the 80s Vikings had porcelain tubs and were definitely Hotpoint-style machines). 

I recollect your considerable efforts and talent in restoring yours. It is possible, I know of one from the late '70s without damage.

Sadly, though, for most of them, it's too late.

Hi Joe, GE never had a drop door DW with a porclean interior with the exception of the low end rebadged Hotpoint style models that they started selling in the early 80s when GE switched their entire DW line to all plastic tub models.  The main reason GE started selling these low end HP style porclean DWs was GE was worried about lousing builder sales because their DWs  had an all plastic tub and they worried about acceptance with builders and consumers alike.

The one thing you can credit GE with is they put millions of built-in DWs into American homes, The US quickly had the highest percentage of homes that had DWs in the world and still has the highest percentage today.

The GE Plastic-sol DWs were cheap to build throughout the 60s-70s, the plastic-sol coated steel tubs were far cheaper to make than porclean on steel and saved GE hundreds of thousands of dollars in loses due to shipping and other handling damage due to chipped tubs that often caused entire new DWs to be scraped.

Stainless Steel was out of the question for home machines in the 60s due to cost and scarcity of nickle to make SS. The only company that made real SS DW tubs in the US was KA and it was a one hundred option only on their TOL models 15-18 series DWs. [ Thermador did build expensive SS DWs in the mid to late 60s, the TD-WK DWs that came later were not real SS ]

My mother's cousin had a BOL GE d/w with Plastisol, builder grade with dial lower on the door panel, below the latch/handle.  Harvest gold, early 70's.  She piled that machine full, never rinsed and loved the results.  When it finally gave up she bought another GE, BOL with the HP porcelain tank and had no complaints.   We had lots of big family dinners at their house, Bob would have been heaven.   I was never as happy with the outcome of either of those GE normal cycles compared with our '81 Maytag Jetclean, but she was fine with it as were millions of people just happy to have a dishwasher in their new apartment.  

And it's BOL of the BOL of the first PermaTuf C range. It's:

RRWRRRD

So that confirms John's memory.

The first rinse is actually intended as a wash if you read the operating instructions, there is also a pre-wash detergent cup next to the closed cup to help the user to measure detergent for the pre-wash.

IMEO it is never a good idea to run a DW with soiled dishes and no detergent, it just leads to strange gunky build-ups in hidden areas of the DW.

All the GE-HP-GE MM models being discussed in this thread DO have soft-food-disposers built into the pump assembles.

John L.

Multiple rinses - both before the main wash as well as after.

Laundress has already described the logic behind the pre-wash rinses. There's a set of reasons for the post-wash rinses, too.

BOL GE had neither filters nor 'power showers', just a bottom wash arm and a tower-of-power with a special top part which, under proper conditions, distributed enough water straight up into a special molding to splash a little bit onto the glasses and bowls on the upper rack.

One ill-placed bowl, cup, whatever and that third level 'wash' was gone.

So - yibblets and ick all over the place.

The three rinses often as not got enough clear water splashed around to remove them.

Second reason, dangerous to consume as today's detergents are, the chlorine bleach/extremely caustic detergents of that era really needed to be gone from your cooking and eating utensils.

The design of the GE sump is such that there's a fair amount of water left in it from each previous cycle. Not the liter which some hysterical anti-GE fanatics claim, but enough that the first rinse after the wash wasn't a rinse, it was a second (third if you count pre-wash) wash. Just a short, weak wash, but a wash none-the-less.

So, you really have one clear rinse and one heated (more or less) final rinse with rinse-aid.

Something the eco-freaks also forget: This water is not hard to treat, it's easy as pie to 'recycle' at the water treatment plant. The only way to (just barely) get by with one single rinse is with a system of brilliant filters, perfect spray distribution and really hot wash/rinse such as the real KitchenAides had.

A 500 watt element will heat the water during a potscrubber cycle about 10 degrees. That's the whole amount! These machines were running 11 to 18 minutes (correct me if I'm wrong) short of that, the most the element could do was to keep the water at the incoming temperature.