Shop book, open to the current page

Machines come in broken and leave typing a straight line, and everything in between gets written down.

Job sheets from a one-person typewriter repair bench in Leipzig: platen rubber, escapement timing, segment cleaning, draw cords and the small adjustments in between.

Six stops between the door and the door

01InCase off, serial read, every typebar lifted by hand and dropped.
02StripPanels away, ribbon and spools out, carriage locked for the mat.
03WashSegment flushed a few millilitres at a time, tray underneath.
04DryOn its back for a day, longer between November and March.
05SetEscapement handover, draw cord turns, ring and cylinder last.
06OutFull page typed, margins measured top and bottom, sheet filed.

Job sheets, newest at the top

Each one written while the machine was still open on the mat. Where an adjustment did not hold, the sheet keeps the attempt and says what replaced it.

004

Fitting a new draw cord and finding the right mainspring tension

The carriage cord is the one part on these machines guaranteed to fail eventually. How I choose the line, tie it, wind the drum, and count the turns back in.Carriage8 Sept 20259 min read

003

Cleaning a sluggish segment without dunking the machine

Sticking keys are almost never a lubrication problem. A working method for flushing a segment on the bench, the drying time it really needs, and the paint I stripped by being careless.Cleaning17 Feb 20258 min read

002

Escapement timing on a machine that spaces twice

A 1961 portable that put two spaces in wherever it liked, and the four evenings it took me to understand what the loose dog and the rigid dog are actually doing.Escapement9 Jun 202410 min read

001

How I decide a platen is too hard to keep using

Four years of squeezing rubber rollers taught me almost nothing, so I bought a durometer. What the numbers actually changed about the work on this bench.Platen14 Nov 20239 min read

Every sheet in the book

Taped inside the cupboard door

Four lines I keep breaking

I fix mechanical typewriters at one bench in Leipzig and write up each job while the machine is still in pieces, because a repair I cannot describe afterwards is a repair I only half understood.

01Write the job up before the case goes back on.
02Measure the rubber. Do not squeeze it and guess.
03One adjustment at a time, then type a full line.
04If I broke it, the sheet says so in the first line.