While the traditional way of preventing rust is oil, I have found a good wax, ie car type wax, does an equally good job. The advantage is that it does not leave a residue that captures dirt and leaving a shinny surface the dirt does not stick as readily,. Over 50 years ago my father in law purchase a table saw with cast iron table. I inherited that saw and today the surface is as good as it was 50 years ago. I use car wax on the surface. I clean it with solvent to remove the old wax so it does not build up before applying the next coat. I do this at least twice per year. I use the same technique for my tools that have surfaces that area suppose to be shinny. If you currently have rust on the surfaces, I would clean them with a wire brush. When I got as much off as possible I would clean the surface with a solvent. Finally if there are still areas of rust I would remove it with an extremely find grade of sand paper and then apply car wax. If you don't get it exactly the way you want the surface, go ahead and use it. The next rainy day when you have no work in the garden, repeat the process.

A strong-enough solution and/or long-enough exposure will dissolve hidden residue. Don't overdo it and always rinse to avoid potential damage to machine material, although citric acid isn't as aggressive as some other products. I once left an old Maytag soaking with too much Limeaway for too long and etched the Bakelite agitator (which material hasn't been used for them in years).

My thoughts ... 1) A couple/three more gallons of water can be added to insure the fill level is above the scum-level so the cleaning solution reaches it. 2) His comment about older machines having faster cycles ... the timer was set a 6 mins wash time when he starts the machine (at 6:06 in the video) ... which is less than half the maximum available time of 14 mins. 3) It's highly unlikely that degree of residue (including what's on the exterior/bottom of the spin basket) will fully remove, even on multiple treatments, without disassembly for direct scrubbing ... as he did at the end. Do that immediately and be done with the job, then enact preventative measures to avoid recurrence. 4) Regards to "soap scum," modern laundry detergents are a very different substance than soaps of yore. Soaps react with hard water to create scum, thus the need for water softener products (Calgon, anyone?) in the past. Use of soap is rare nowadays vs. synthetic detergent. Detergents (when dosed properly) have ingredients to handle the mineral content of hard water without creating "scum." The residue is an accumulation of laundry soils that didn't sequester into the wash water for flushing away.

Thanks for pointing that out. By mistake I found the Affresh dishwasher tablets ingredients, which sounded right after I was told to try citric acid and baking soda over on the automaticwasher forum years ago. I also watched a video on youtube called "Clean a Washing Machine Inside: How to Remove Mold, Soap Scum and More with a CHEAP Organic Cleaner" where the author used citric acid and oxyclean. The two main ingredients of affresh washing machine tablets are 65% Sodium percarbonate or oxygen bleach aka oxiclean, and 15% Sodium carbonate or washing/baking soda. I also believed my local speed queen dealer when he told me liquid laundry detergent contains animal fat.. Turns out soaps used to, but do not now.. You can get build ups from using a lot of fabric softener and then washing with two little detergent and in cold water however, and that’s very hard to get rid of. Anyway, sorry for the disinformation, but I'm finally getting to the bottom of what can clean out the gunk of the 24 front load LG's I'm responsible for in the dorms I do maintenance in. I started a discussion at automaticwasher forum called How much citric acid and baking soda to clean a SQ FL? Borax, and what I'm learning, is that dishwasher detergent is the best choice. Maybe lol