jim washer

JIM WASHER
The other day I ran across a prepper blog article on “five ways to wash your clothes without power”.  Tellingly, as in tellingly those sons a bitches still refuse to heed my wisdom even after years and years of casting my pearls before swine, the Jim Washer was NOT listed.  Instead, they had to gay it up with Too Complicated, Too Expensive and Too Much Work ( I tried leaving a comment but it wouldn’t go through- I think I’m flagged or something ).  I came up with the Jim Washer eons ago, and those silly enough to have been reading back then and still reading now can revel in my refresher course.  The complicated way that was presented was to hook the agitator up to a bicycle.  Yes, we’ve all seen the movie “Mosquito Coast” with Harrison Ford.  If not, I’d recommend it.  Or the book-the film is pretty faithful and the book was written in one of those styles that suggests the author is just this side of a snob so if you skip the written form you aren’t out a whole lot.  In fact, I’d say the book is the authors One Hit Wonder- never much cared for any of the others I tried.  Anyway, Mosquito Coast is an underrated prepper book, and one of the gadgets Engineer Dad comes up with is the ol’ washing machine from a bicycle.  For Gear Heads, this is just the thing to tinker with.  There was also a book not too long ago-if I’m not mistaken, recommended by Rawles- about all the cool stuff Third World folks run with bicycle power.  It would be fascinating to find out if those folks got the idea for the washer from the book, or visa versa.

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The Too Expensive Way was the original standby, the James Washer.  This has been around forever, a commercially manufactured unit where a thirty gallon steel barrel is cut in half and a flat top welded over the opening ( this is the basic design, not how they make the thing ) and the thing rests on legs at waist level with an attached arm sticking up.  You push the handle back and forth to agitate.  VERY pricey.  As in, our Union workers can only make one of these a day after breaks and mandatory OSHA meetings so we got to charge you $500 each kind of pricey.  It’s a friggin covered steel drum, for humps sake.  Then there are the three Too Much Work ways, all of which involve arm muscle.  The old wash board.  The toilet plunger through the five gallon bucket lid.  And one that escapes me at the moment.  Of COURSE washing was drudgery.  The gal of the house doesn’t have a huge upper body muscle mass to use and these things use way too much of that.  The Jim Washer uses leg muscle, and not much of it.  You put the laundry in a five gallon bucket and strap the bucket into the seat of a rocking chair.  You sit on the couch behind the chair and use your feet, resting atop the back of the rockers, to gently keep the chair rocking as you keep occupied otherwise such as reading.  Unlike those chauvinist pig capitalist humps out there trying to make the work of our neo-pioneer women more difficult, exploiting them and condemning them to a life of laundry hell, I have liberated them and made more leisure time they may enjoy!  Celebrate me, oh unworthies! All others trying to rip off my idea may burn in the lower bowels of Hell, amen.

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