L. C. Smith revival

My heart sank when I saw this machine. 

A retired colleague found it in her garage. She believed it once belonged to her father. Could I restore it?

Well—I did.

Here's how.

First, a few more views of the condition of this poor thing when it arrived:

Makes my skin crawl just looking at it!

I cleaned off the serial number, 279811-8, identifying it as a model 8 made in 1916. Since my colleague is in her 70s or so, it is possible that her father bought it new when he was a young man.

I had to get the paper tray off in order to clean under it and replace the ruined feed rollers. But how? I had never dared to do it before.

Cesar Martinez of Eagle Eye came to my rescue with some helpful videos that he created on the spot. Turns out that you have to fiddle with some tiny screws that are tucked away. The entire assembly of front scales is confusing, and if you mess with it, I advise you to take plenty of pictures and notes. Why did Smith make it so hard to swap feed rollers??

The rollers certainly needed replacing:

A local auto parts store fortunately had two sizes of tubing that fit the two sizes of roller.

Some other generous typospherians offered to replace the paper table, but I thought that it was more important to keep the original parts of this machine that has major sentimental value. I cleaned the paper table and painted around the remnants of the decal, using a black Uni-Paint paint marker.

The same paint marker did a lot of touching up elsewhere. The machine was starting to look better.

Note the pipe cleaners holding the automatic ribbon reverse mechanisms closed. If they are both open, the mechanism jams.

There are more scales in back, which can be removed ...

... and dunked, along with other parts, in rust remover (Rust911 concentrate will make 16 gallons and works great).

The carriage had to come off too. This is easy once you know the trick: the upper carriage rail slides out once you remove two long screws from the back. Then, carefully observe the location of two ball bearing holders. One of them keeps its bearings secure; the other is separate from two bearings which you obviously must not lose.

One of the links between a tabulator key and the tabulator was missing. This is a common problem on L. C. Smiths. As I've done before, I replaced it with a length of wire from a clothes hanger.

Other useful tools:

Fine steel wool and a wire brush for cleaning rusty parts that can't be removed from the typewriter, including key rings

Air compressor, toothbrushes, and Q-tips for removing dirt

Scrubbing Bubbles

Soft Scrub

Mineral spirits mixed with a little Marvel Mystery Oil

Turtle Wax for cleaning and polishing paint

And finally, my trick for getting smooth black paint as shiny as possible is to spray Pledge on it, smear it with your finger, let it dry, then polish with a soft rag.

Here are some more views of the restored typewriter:

It looks pretty good, and I think my colleague will be pleased.

Of course, when it was new, it would have been more impressive. Fresh off my success with this no. 8, I decided to clean the nice no. 2 that I've had for many years. I enjoyed doing that while chatting with other typewriter collectors on Zoom last night. Here are some views of this beautiful machine.