Thread: Vintage tractors the rage in Tasmania

Originally Posted by Tins

My gran had one of those. Her laundry was under the house. The Simpson was next to the briquette hot water heater. It was a new fangled contraption compared to the wash board and mangle she used before it arrived.
The pop open rollers were an advanced safety feature....

I am pretty sure that the first one that my Mother had was 32 Volts--which is what we had on the farm at that time. The later one with the full length skirt probably replaced it when the grid power came through, around 1954. Yes, the safety roller release was a feature.

I used to work on them occasionally and what I remember the most was the revolting sickly smell of the gearbox oil. No idea just what it was, but the smell used to bring me close to vomiting!

You mentioned briquettes: my late Father worked at the old Yallourn power house just after WW2 and used to talk about the briquettes, in fact he may have worked in that part of the operation. Somewhere I have, or had, a book that I bought for him about the history of Yallourn. (I was born in Moe)

You also mentioned mangles: again while we were on the farm my aunty in the city gave my Father a mangle. It was complete but we never used it as such. It was converted into a hand winch used to pull the spoil out of a well we dug. I later used the cast iron legs to make up a rudimentary wood lathe! all gone now.

I can remember my mother handwringing clothes but was then very happy to get a mangle. But I think they were very concerned about the potential for wringing small boys' fingers, plus it really needs two to operate, one to turn the handle, the other to put the clothes in. And as there was no safety, both had to be aware of what they were doing.

This was replaced after quite a short time by a wringer similar to the one on the Simpson above, with a handle that could be turned by your right hand as the left one fed the clothes in from the left hand trough, where the washboard had been used to scrub the clothes, into the rinse water in the right hand trough. You then empty the LH trough and wring them the other way.

This in turn was replaced by the washing machine similar to the one shown above.

Strangely enough, hand clothes wringers are still available for sale on the internet. If I recall correctly some of then could be mounted on the dividing panel on double cement wash troughs:

hand wringer.jpg

And for those confused by all us grandpa's ramblings, a "mangle":

mangle.jpg