Typin' it up ooooold school

What do you do when you have too many projects going on? Get another! Latest on the block is going to be the Royal 10 typewriter. Chances are it's older than you.

I got it on the cheap from ebay. It's a little rusty and needs a good cleaning, but I'm sure with that taken care of it will be a phenomenal machine and an awesome piece of history. One of the things I find terribly interesting about it is the lack of the 1 key. To produce a 1 you type a lowercase L. Also without the 1 you don't have the exclamation mark. To produce this you type a period, backspace and then type an apostrophe. 

This is the first typewriter. In being shipped the carriage was free and slammed around totally destroying the gears. There wasn't much that could be done for it at that point as it quickly took it from a restorable piece of machinery to something that's only worth the remaining parts.

In searching online I found a guy out of the Netherlands who does reproduction water slides. If it's the full set what I'll be doing is a full tear down and restoration. It should be quite exciting, and when it's done I'll have my very own typewriter. If I like you enough perhaps I'll type you a letter.

2009.10.08 Not here yet........ Anxious, must type with mechanics soooon!

2009.10.31 First typewriter was destroyed during shipping, lack of proper packing. Got a 2nd one in, and used the first as a parts machine to fix all the minor things that were off.

I'll get on to the write up of replacing the carriage slide, but just a bit about what I've done so far.

The first thing of course was a major cleaning and lubricating all the parts up. The keys E G and F did not hit correctly and the strike lever would not return to it's original position. I found that by slightly bending the connecting rods I was able to get the keys to lower all the way back down to normal and type properly. This was a pretty easy fix and I was able to do it with some long needle nosed plyers.

A couple minor parts that I pulled from the original typewriter were the rollers on the bar that goes down on the top of the paper. There were originally only two, but I like the way the paper is held with 4 rollers on there. The other thing was that my first typewriter had 5 tab stops with it, while the newer one had only two. The older ones look a bit cooler too. I'll take a comparison pic later. Anyway I cleaned up the first ones and transported them over on to the second so I can have an ample amount of tabulation.

Here is the actual first major repair I've done, and hopefully barring any unforseen accidents, any other repairs will simply be in thr course of regular maintenance or cosmetic in purpose.

I'm moderately pleased with myself on this one as it involved removing the entire carriage assembly. It did take me quite a few hours and I was pale and shrunken from lack of sleep when it was done but it was an accomplishment.

The issue was that when you'd return the carriage to the beginning of a line, the characters would step down until they reached the regular height of the rest of the line. I wasn't sure what was causing this until I spun the typewriter around and looked underneath to find that the slide attached to the carriage itself was broken clean through. The bolts and bars that are all over the rest of the carriage was what was holding it in place, but the fact that it was split in two meant that it wiggled a bit.

What I was able to do was take the slide from the original typewriter, remove it entirely, and then disassemble the carriage from the new typrwriter as well and use the original for replacement. It definitely helped having a parts machine to break it down step by step instead of having to fool around with my actual functioning machine first. As there is only a year difference in age on these machines the slide was exactly the same. Also in having it apart I was able to further clean things up and get them properly lubricated.

When everything was said and done, the rebuilt carriage worked even better than when I first got it. It's definitely much smoother on the return as well as in advancing. By the way, is anyone else disappointed  in the G.I.Joe movie that Cobra Commander doesn't have a bitchy voice like he did in the cartoon?