CONVENTION CRASHING: WORLD EDUCATIONAL CONGRESS FOR LAUNDERING AND DRY CLEANING

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 | 6:55 a.m.

Clean '07 comes with its own theme music.

You walk into the hall and there are all of these machines, some the size of big rig trailers, some bigger, a lot of them whirring and going, "pfft, pfft," hangers and baskets clattering along tracks, automatic sorters shunting things down different conveyors, whirr, clackatta, pfft, pfft - and suddenly your brain starts playing that stomping assembly line music from all the old Warner Bros. cartoons. ("Powerhouse," by Raymond Scott. Now you know.)

And while you're waiting for Bugs Bunny to run through, you realize that the people running the machines are taking piles of clean and folded sheets from one end and dumping them in the other like it's Sisyphus' Fluff 'n' Fold.

Clean '07 - its full name is the World Educational Congress for Laundering and Drycleaning, and you can see why they came up with something shorter - drew about 15,000 people to the Las Vegas Convention Center last week to look at washers and dryers, soap vending machines and other machines to enrich your coin-op, like pinball machines, video games (including one maze game with the unfortunate name of "Flaming Finger") and tanning beds.

But it was the automated industrial laundry equipment, the big stuff for hospitals and hotels, that fascinates, especially if sheet washing is your chore whenever you can't get out of it. Just chuck it in at one end and it comes out clean and ironed at the other end ... hmmm.

The most impressive machines on the floor were from Jensen, a German company. Frank Hamlin, who has the very cool job title of "flatworks service manager," walked me through your automated laundry line.

First, you throw the wash into a tractor-trailer - size contraption called a tunnel washer. It works pretty much like the screw for drawing water through a tube first designed by notable Greek bright guy Archimedes, only his didn't have detergent in it.

(If he'd thought of that, he'd probably have run through the streets nude and bragging. Luckily, he's dead.)

Then the wash, which hopefully you remembered to sort, tumbles into a giant piston-and-cup contraption that, Hamlin explains, "presses it down into a big old cake" and squeezes the water out. The cake is kicked out onto a drying conveying belt. After the drying, another machine breaks it up.

From there, it's back into sorting baskets. The linens and sheets go off to a large machine full of gabbing conveyor belts. Unfortunately, you actually have to feed in the sheets by hand. After that, phew, photo sensors take over, measure their size and send them shooting down different lanes, through a hot ironing drum, and into a chop-folder ("Warning: Crushing Energy," says a sign with a diagram of mangled fingers on it) . Then they get spat out , folded and stacked in neat little piles, according to size.

All in all, a nifty way to do the sheets.

To bad a small setup costs $1.5 million (machines only) and is the size of a three-bedroom house.

Product: Passion of the shirt

It's a torso-shaped blue bag on a stand. You put a wet shirt over it, clamp the shirt tail down, and clamp the arms into cuff receptacles. Then you lever the sleeves to full extension. You restrain the front of the shirt with a vertical bar. Then the bag inflates with hot air. It blasts the shirt with steam. You can even press a hot iron on the shirt while this is going on.

Basically, if the czars had devised tortures for the serfs' shirts, it would look like this.

It's called a "shirt suzy."

From Forenta, $25,800.

Spotted

"Big Coin is Here"

- Sign for the American Dryer Corp.

Overheard

"Rick is a cancer on this organization."

"I don't think you like him."

- One Maytag salesman to another