Saturday, October 19, 2013

Help create a great typewriter repair resource (and tweak your Olympia)

Here's a call to all typospherians!

Nick Beland has made an excellent point:

Collectively, the typosphere has made great progress in solving many of the age- and repair-related complications plaguing our typewriters, finding out that major problems often have simple solutions. ... It's about time we set up a way to keep these repairs organised by brand and model in a central location!

(Nick continues the discussion here.)

As a start, Nick has created a post on Welcome to the Typosphere where we can post links to relevant posts on our blogs. For instance, if you've ever written about how you replaced a missing foot on your Remington portable or fixed a sticky return lever on a Torpedo, just share the URL for your post on Nick's post. He'll start organizing these URLs into a page that is going to be increasingly useful.

Here is where to share your URLs.

As a contribution to this project, here's my discussion of several ways to "tweak" your Olympia SM, from the September 2011 issue of ETCetera (click to enlarge).




7 comments:

  1. Yes, I remember enjoying that article in the September 2011 ETCetera very much and recall thinking at the time it was published that there was a need for more of this type of thing. Clear illustrations like this are very helpful indeed.

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  2. Fantastic idea, and great article. Well done, Nick and Richard.

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  3. Very snazzy choice of colour for the SM3! Great article too; I must remember to bookmark it for the next time I pull out my SM4. Robert made a good point on illustrations. Not all descriptions of fixes that are blogged about have accompanying pictures and they're really useful for those new to typewriter tweaking.

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  4. Agreed about pix. It was a step-by-step guide online, with photos, plus a service manual I purchased, which had some rather sketchy sketches, that got me over the hump in my first typewriter restoration, of a rustbucket Oliver 9.

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  5. Hi - any thoughts as to where I might find a PDF of the manual for the SM4? Cheers, James

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    1. I don't have one, but here you can find one for the SM3. The difference is that the SM4 sets and clears tabulator stops using keys on either side of the space bar.

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