I like this car.
I watch this vid.
I
Baby gets here. Nice.
But it is dead on arrival.
a) Carriage does not advance
b) Spacebar does not work
c) Right shift key does not work
d) Sticky keys
e) Stinky as hell
Bottomline:
I get partial refund.
I own dead Baby.
What to do?
I channel Richard Wan Kenobi.
He appears as a holographic image from the planet Naboo.
His words of wisdom...
Uh-oh
a) I am not the handyman/tinkerer type. Never been.
b) I cannot find an "anatomy of the typewriter" online.
c) I can only do cleaning and changing ribbons.
d) I do not want to lose the Baby.
But
a) I am intuitive. Very.
b) I trust the Jedi master's wisdom.
c) I do not want to lose the Baby.
Scenes are too graphic for words...
Correction: it's Billy Kwan (scroll down two posts below- "The Year of Typing Dangerously").
The first time I chanced upon the the website-name "Machines of Loving Grace," I thought it was romantic overkill. After my firsthand encounter with the hidden mechanisms of a typewriter- the complex system of moving parts, the unbelievable precision, and the beauty of it all -I now understand how true that description is.
Shoutout to Richard P- many thanks for pushing me out of my comfort zone. I still can't believe that I actually restored a 1940s Hermes Baby!
* Typos- I'd, something
* Typecast via Billy Kwan!
* Source for Richard's photo here.
(please don't sue me)
15 comments:
Even newbies become heroes. Well done! I'm watching a Hermes Baby that ends in about 90 minutes, but I already have nine typewriters and nowhere to store them properly and if I get one more, my wife will store it on my head.
Slightly off-topic, Ton, I have an instruction booklet for an Olivetti Studio 44 and, if I recall correctly, you have this model. I got this booklet with my Olympia SM2 (?) Somewhere in the world, there's a person with an Olivetti Studio 44 and an Olympia SM2 instruction book. Anyway, do you want this booklet? If so, let me know and we'll organise it somehow. Again, nice work on the Hermes!
The Force was with you! Particularly if you got it to smell good. Congratulations!
Superb work! That's one of the things I really love about typewriters - fascinatingly complex machines, but once you open up the case and poke at the innards, working the levers and watching carefully, it becomes fairly obvious what parts do what functions. Then it's generally pretty easy to fix problems that seem insurmountable when you've pulled it out of the badly-packed shipping box.
Congrats on your new Baby! (:
Wow, well done! Very inspiring! I may dig into my Mill to finally fix that spacebar issue.
Tremendous job! It looks great and types great. It always feels gratifying when you take a dead typewriter and transform it into a living entity. Hopefully you'll get many years of typing from your new Baby.
@Richard, Lol Yeah, I got that down pat.
@teertiz, I don't know about "hero," just dreaming lo-tech. I do have the instruction manual for Studio 44 but thanks, really nice of you.
@Ted, yeah, it makes sense when you focus closely enough. Those tiny springs were challenging!
@notagain & Flynn, thanks for the affirmation!
Wow, this is really inspiring. Like you, I do not consider myself mechanically handy. But I have a typer with a hinky ribbon advance and another that needs a through, inside-out cleaning. I've been dang near terrified to attempt anything on my own. But when I see this . . . I think . . . perhaps it is possible!
p.s. Teeritz - I've been looking for a Studio 44 manual for some time. Would you consider letting it go to the U.S. for some reasonable amount?
Thanks for your comment, Leadeaux, much appreciated. Happy to hear you are open to taking those "baby" steps like I did!
Like you, I am mechanically challenged, but the very first typewriter I opened was a Hermes Baby, thanks to good pictures of the anatomy I found on Georg's Flickr stream. I found it so surprisingly easy and did it several times after that (once to apply some red paint) and I joke that I could open these '40s Babys in my sleep. Other makes and models are more challenging, but getting this down was definitely a confidence booster! The extent of my "repairs" has only been to clean and de-gunk, though, I have to admit.
Adwoa, thanks for sharing this. Yes, the mechanisms made sense when I got to them. It's diagnosing where the problems were and negotiating through really tiny little parts that was the real big challenge for me!
Hahaha! Good job with the typewriter repair!!!
Wait a minute. Hermes? Any relation to the Birkin and the Kelly? Designer typewriter? :)
Great! I like both the pictures and the description. Maybe my Hermes Baby would appreciate such a cleaning, too.
AWESOME! Hopefully nothing goes wrong with any of my typers; I just took off the paneling of my Brother Deluxe 220 to see what it looked like inside...and GENTLY bent back a messed-up typebar of my Smith Corona Silent. Nothing big.
However, very inspiring!
Vikram, I'm glad I caught your comment, thanks!
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