Monday, February 1, 2016

Remington Portable internals all gummed-up

The parts machine Remington Portable #2 typewriter was not working, the typebars wouldn't even lift up and seemed jammed in place. Prodding some more when trying to take off the bodypanels, it turned out that it was just sticky typebars that were jamming the lifting mechanism. The segment has a dark brown tarry substance all over that very firmly holds typebars in position.

That doesn't explain why the protecting hooks are bent all out of shape, but did make it possible to take it apart and get at the internals:


The machine probably was badly oiled some time ago - this 'bad' oil by now has turned into a brown, sticky substance. Looks like creosote in the machinery.


Some keylevers have slipped off their linkages, but overall there looks to be nothing really fundamentally un-fixable, nothing that I don't now have parts for.

In addition to the oiling, it has had some repairs done on the keyboard, with a new 'z' keytop and the shifts getting 'foreign' parts. These look out of place rather (to me). So the one little thing to properly fix this one up again would be some correct pattern keyrings for the shifts and a new 'z' key. Or keep the thing as 'parts' of course.

First up a slow, long, thorough de-gunking!

4 comments: