The Royal has no clothes.

Made some more progress on the Model 10.

Got the front panel and rear top panels off. Got the carriage out. It appears that the sides & rear are one piece of iron, so I don’t think there are any more covers to remove.

I got the type bars to travel the full stroke!

No more covers to remove.

Once I removed the carriage, I confirmed that the far end of the draw band is missing, so I’m adding that to the list of parts I need to source.

The draw band connects the carriage to the main spring. When you press the carriage return lever to the right, you wind the main spring. With each key press, the spring pulls the carriage to the left. The escapement allows the carriage to move only one twelfth of an inch with each character.

The draw band is a fabric band with a metal loop at each end. One end connects to the main spring, the other to a hook on the right end of the carriage.

Main spring end of the draw band.
The far end of the draw band goes here.

If I had the loop for the far end, I’d be able to make my own band, but I’ve found a typewriter repair shop that will make one up for me.

Now that I have all the covers off, I’m able to actually follow the mechanics of the typewriter to see where the faults are. I was working under the assumption that my type bars weren’t traveling the full stroke because there was debris (maybe the missing draw band?) fouling the mechanism.

The mechanism was fouled, but it was at the key end. And now that I’ve cleared it, I think that it was a feature not a bug.

Here’s the blockage.

There’s a metal plate under the keyboard mounted on a pivot. There’s a spring to pull the top edge of the plate forward. There is a rod that ties into the escapement (I still don’t know what its purpose is, more research needed.) which pushes the bottom forward & the top edge back. When the top edge of this plate is on the rear position, the keys can’t come down, so the type bars can’t go up, and none of the rest of the machine can move.

Anyway, I loosened the screws at either end of the pivot for this plate and rotated the plate forward, and now my type bars can strike the ribbon.

I sort of wonder if this plate was pushed back and locked in place as a way to protect the typewriter while it was in transit.

I still have six bars that won’t retract all the way, so I’m still working on that.

Removing the carriage was a bit of fun, basically had to remove two stop blocks and then just slide the carriage out of the machine. I didn’t get any images of the process because it took two hands to wriggle it free.

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Author: rexplex

With a bachelors degree in history, I turn wrenches for a living. I’m most at peace when I hear the wind in the trees or the gurgle of a brook. I’m a believer in the Renaissance Man, as epitomized by DaVinci engineer, artist, soldier, statesman. As Heinlein said, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

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