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We can see that the channels are separate (not the same piece) |
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| The bottom, threaded part of the screw that holds the 2 channels together, and clamp around the ball bearings and rails. |
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| The screw head, behind the paper table. |
Transcript
This phenomenon has happened before, but once again, this repair story has proven to me how observation is one of the most powerful skills to a typewriter tinkerer. I got this Silver Reed SR180 De Luxe off, eBay for £17 delivered, and got the nice surprise to find a fresh new ribbon had been installed. But despite the new ribbon, it looked like the tops of the letters, both in lower and upper case, were faded. My first thought was that the machine had come out of alignment. On these machines and their Silverette cousins, adjusting the stops where the carriage rests in lower and upper case is simple enough: one nut and one screw on each side for each one of the stops, and you’re in business. And so I ordered a set of mini open-end wrenches to loosen the locking nuts, and prepared myself for the task ahead of me. In the back of my head though, something did not quite make sense. What would be the odds that all 4 carriage stops would come out of alignment, seemingly by the same amount on all 4 corners? Slim to none was my answer to this question. I took the machine out again, and decided to give it another good look. The shift mechanism on this machine would be categorised as a carriage shift, but the machine actually pivots the carriage towards the back, rather than lifts it up. I tried to exercise the carriage shift with my hand, and I realised that something was indeed not right. There seemed to be excessive play in the carriage itself before it would start pivoting to the-back. And this would definitely explain why the top of the letters would be cropped off : the carriage was hanging too low, rather than the type slugs being too high. To confirm my suspicions, I proceeded to do a very simple test. First, I would raise a type bar to the platen with my hand, aA press the type slug against the ribbon and the page, so as to make a light imprint on the page. This step confirms and records the “before” state of the machine. The second step involved 2 hands. With one, I would “raise” the carriage so that the slack was taken up, and with the other hand, I would raise the same type bar and create an imprint on the page just as before. The result spoke for itself : the second imprint was fully visible and any fading at the top was not visible. Armed with the knowledge that something, was loose, I set out to find out what needed fixing, and how to solve the root cause of the issue. Observing the carriage and the rail on which it rides from the side showed me that these 2 pieces were not riding tightly, and that is where the play was. I could lift the carriage up, without the rail on the frame moving at all. Looking at the carriage from the underside, in particular focusing on how the rails were interacting with the frame, I realised that the angle channels in which the ball bearings ride were adjustable, and that the carriage was in fact sandwiching the ball bearings and the part of the frame that the carriage rides on, and I could see the threads of the screws holding the 2 halves of the rail together, and this in precisely where the play was coming from. A quick peak behind the paper table al-lowed me to see the heads of the screws, hex-shaped.
From that point on, things became very straightforward, and the repair, or rather the adjustment, was completed in less than 5 minutes, with the outcome we all relish: a fully working machine, that types beautifully crisp characters. It was only a matter of loosening ever so slightly the screws 4 along the length of the carriage squeezing the rails together so they grip the frame tightly with my free hand, and while holding the position, going in with my 5mm open-ended wrench to tighten the screws back up; noting that the carriage rails were a bit tighter towards the end of travel positions, and thus I made sure to allow for the slightest bit of play to allow free travel of the carriage along its entire length.
The main takeaway from this tale, besides the actual fix, is that, had I not taken the time to observe the machine properly one more time before embarking on repair journey, I would have gone ahead with the improper fix for the situation, caused probably (if not certainly) more harm than good, and would not even have fixed the root cause of the bad behaviour. Eventually I would have had to readjust the carriage stops, and I am pretty much convinced that I would not have done as good a job as they did back in the day at the factory.
Lesson learnt!
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