An extra-special Erika M portable typewriter

The end of the road

Last time on Heroic Efforts to Revive Obsolete Office Technology, I had found a crack in my intended replacement carriage, and had patched it with J-B Weld.



The glue held.

Now I could simply transplant the donor carriage onto the recipient machine!



But no ... it felt weird and rough. When it spaced, it spaced in big jolts. Could it be that a carriage from one Underwood S wouldn't fit another?

I racked my brains and fiddled with the thing for an hour until the answer leapt out at me.



I was trying to put an elite carriage (12 characters per inch) onto a pica typewriter (10 cpi).

This job had just become harder. Maybe impossible.

The toothed rack had to be swapped from the recipient carriage to the donor carriage.



So did the tabulator stops.



Here's a neat little detail on one of the tab stop racks.



Finally, the elite carriage had been turned into a pica one — I hoped.

I wiggled it onto the typewriter. It seemed to mesh better. But would this operation really be a success?



The end of the road for this repair job is, I hope, just the beginning of a new set of typing adventures for this  Underwood that has been brought back from a broken heart.

A heart transplant?

Previously on Rescuing Twentieth-Century Writing Iron, I cleaned up this 1940 Underwood, but found that it had a fatal flaw in its carriage.

Well, it occurred to me that I could replace the entire carriage, and I was pretty sure I had the right parts machine. I could attach the old paper table and maybe some other parts onto the new carriage, so this machine with sentimental family value would retain its appearance.

The typewriter's owner authorized me to give it a try.

On a basement shelf was this parts machine with a carriage ready to go!


But no. There was no way it would fit.

I determined that my parts machine was a Model SS (1946-1953). The machine I needed to fix was a Model S (1940-1946). Yes, as it turns out, it makes a big difference. I won't go into the technical details here, but will just say that despite the basic similarities among Underwood models, there was a real evolution. (Here you can find my review of 53 years of Underwoods.)

Well, then I got the bright idea of checking my garage. Yes, there are more writing machines hanging out in there. Bingo! A Model S, just about 1000 serial numbers away from my patient.

Here are the donor (left) and the recipient awaiting a carriage transplant.



Here's the donor carriage:



Cork feed rollers! This is very unusual. I imagine they were replaced sometime during World War II, when materials like rubber were often reserved for the military. I've seen several cork platens on British wartime typewriters.



But what's this under the paper table?

We have another broken carriage frame!!



I'm starting to think that the cast iron on the Model S carriage was too thin or too brittle.

Fortunately, this break is in a less crucial place than the break in the recipient machine's carriage. I'm trying to heal it with J-B Weld and an extra little metal piece to reinforce the frame.



By tonight, the J-B should have cured enough for me to proceed. Stay tuned for Part 3 ...