(soft upbeat music)
- Everybody's got their favorite part of the cycle.
There are people that love the wash,
they love the rinse, or the spin, or the drain.
I'm a spin guy.
I love the spin.
My name is Jon Charles, and
I'm a washer collector enthusiast.
- Laundry day.
- [Jon] The club got started around 1987, I think,
and now we have, like, 3,000 members from all over the world.
We get together for washes.
You do laundry 'til like four in the morning,
you do your margaritas and you launder together.
- To laundry.
- [Jon] We watch the cycles, you'll see a lot of us
just stand there and watch the whole cycle go through.
- Oh, oh my God.
- All 3,000 of us come in with a story like
I thought I was the only one,
I thought I was the only person in the world that did this.
In the collection, I've got 59 machines,
and I've got 22 hooked up and running
down here in the basement.
(knocking)
I have a good representation of everything
that was made, from 1938 to today.
And I take them all apart and I restore them 'cause
I wanna know how everything works inside the machine.
And then the laundry is for me,
it's sorta like the frosting on the cake.
These machines represent a lot of ways
of doing things in each decade that changed,
that we no longer do.
And I think it's something that should be
preserved for other people,
if we can get them interested.
I just can't go to a cocktail party
and say, “How's your washer doing?”
They'd look at me like I was crazy.
But I can get together with these guys,
let my hair down, uh, it's just so much fun
to be able to have a conversation about it,
'cause I know laundry's a chore for everybody else,
but for us it's play.