Filthy Labs: the PTFE conclusion

Welcome back to Filthy Labs. 

Previously in Filthy Labs, we began to assess the effectiveness of a "Wet" Teflon based lubricant spray on  the functionality of a previously gummed up typewriter. The machine in question was an Adler Gabby 25, which had been filled with a capricious amount of WD40 by its previous owner. The WD40 was cleaned out by an extensive blast of degreaser more recently, but after the machine sat idle for some months it began to jam up again significantly.

Two types of lubricant were applied to parts of this typewriter. The details of which can be found HERE. Both of the lubricants were used on the segment across selected groups of type bars. A control group was established of type bars that were left UN-lubricated.

*Please note. Typewriter manufacturers do not advise the lubrication of the segment.*

The Gabby on cleaning day, 3.5 months ago. 

Hypothesis: 

After an initial 3 months of storage, this typewriter began to return to very stiff operation - despite the WD40 being removed. Lubrication was applied to the machine in controlled areas, ensuring comparison between the control and non control group type-bars. The control group consisted of type bars in the segment that had not been treated.

The Teflon spray should have both cleaned and kept the type-bars lubricated, while the control bars are expected to return to their previously 'sticky' state.

Method:

After basic operation and initial testing, this machine was kept in storage - inactive, for 3 months through the hot summer period. It is then tested with some rigorous typing.

 Observation:

 

Has it really been 3 months since I last wrote on this machine? Damn! How time flies. 

I grabbed the Adler typewriter out of the cupboard, fed some paper into it, and was immediately reminded of how  incredibly smooth the operation of the carriage was. Over time the waxy 'dry' lubricant that I had applied into the tracks and had left the operation feeling very refined. I have observed this in numerous machines that I have applied the 'dry' lubricant into, and I still feel surprised by how dramatic the change is.

I began typing on the machine, and found the treated group keys (PTFE spray) was completely functional and smooth to operate. However, one of the keys on the right hand side of the keyboard still felt slow - and it seemed to stick a little, before settling back into place. It was a key that held a couple of fraction functions, and I checked my previous attempt at using this key, and found I had barely operated it previously. 

the 'Q' key that I had injected the 'dry' lubricant into last time as it was super-stuck, operated flawlessly. 

The control group keys had not simply stuck as they had before. The number keys in the control group showed a significant sticking, but in general letter keys operated back and forth typically.

However, there was a distinct difference between the keys in the control group and the keys in the treated group. The control group keys required a notably heavier touch to type with, and they felt as though they were offering considerably greater resistance during typing than the treated group, and the type slugs sometimes rested slightly away from the type-bar rest.

Conclusion:

The idea of studying this lubricant was to find a spray-on lube that would be more effective to use on a typewriter - particularly a gummed up machine, than the often miss-used WD40. It succeeded in producing improved operation over a machine that had been WD'd and it subsequently cleaned whatever residual muck was gummed in there - out. In operation, the lubricant made a significant improvement to the functioning of an otherwise quite dull machine. However, this may not be the case in a machine that was in excellent condition and hadn't been bastardized by a gummed up compound

The lubricant didn't show any obvious bonding depositing of dry residue over the 3 month period, but it hadn't been exposed to significant amounts of dust to trail if it would bond to dust and hold it. Residual lubricant had been brushed and wiped away, and as such there wasn't a lot of surplus lube to bond with dust anyway.

The TF2 wet spray did the job effectively, as did the focused application of the TF2 dry. The results between them did not seem significantly different, however the dry lubricant has a much lower risk of catching dust.

So.. Is it an improvement over using WD40? 

Well! At this point I would personally suggest it over WD40. Obviously with a jammed typewriter you need to give the machine a decent workout no matter what you do with it. Repeated movement of the type-bars helps loosen them up, and the addition of the TF2 lube in this situation certainly assisted this process. The treated parts of the machine worked brilliantly.

Trouble is, recently I've come across several typewriter repair professionals using WD40 in their repair work. At this point I realized that I had made a crucial error in judgement about WD40. I'd simply assumed that the collective knowledge on its use - which was generally a negative opinion  - was true. However some cursory research has shown me that the communal opinion of WD40 may be less and fact, and something more of a meme or a false truism.

This, in my opinion needs further investigation. I think it is time for the Filthy Labs to have a much closer look at WD40 - and what effects it may have on your typewriter.

The PTFE isn't a magic bullet. But, if you really find yourself needing to get your typewriter working with a lubricant, this stuff produces clean and excellent results.

Spoiling Valentine's day letter writing with Google.

It wasn't my fault..

Somehow, I killed the romance of Valentine's day via my blog. Or so the nasty little email said.

I first became aware of my ruining Valentine's day before I received a request to take down my 'letter'. It was in my blog stats... my blog was getting hundreds of hits to my older entry about my Valentine typewriter.

The stats also reveled something else interesting. They revealed that one of the top search terms that had been bringing people to my blog, had been "Valentines letter".

So I entered this into Google, and got a bit of a shock. There was my typed 'Hate letter to my Valentine', displayed as number 4 of the top 5 image searches for this term. Right at the very top of the Google search page.

Oh lovers, how Google was not your friend this Valentine's day! With lines like "With thoughts in mind as to how to dash your pretty keys across the hardened shell of my Remington 16", I can only imagine how people responded when they clicked the image of my scanned letter.

Actually, it gives me a bit of a giggle just thinking about it.

Come on kids... (sigh) Where's the romance!

Oh well... Here's a letter for you star-crossed lovers - or, in text speak U * X <3s, to discover next year. Let me ruin the romance for you, with some vague attempt at poetry.

 

And thus - we have why this blog is called 'The Filthy Platen'.

Next time, just buy them flowers. It is the easiest way to say 'I love you, but don't really want to put any effort into expressing it', that I can think of.

Calling all Brisbanites! (and anyone else)

Thank you Robert for your lovely Poster!

As you can see, I've managed to swing the Museum room at historical The Breakfast Creek hotel.

The Breakfast Creek Hotel is mentioned in the Midnight Oil song 'Dreamworld', and has been a historical centrepoint of Brisbane for well over a century. 

Feel free to drop buy guys. Don't bring too many big machines though. As I've informed them that we're 'A group of writers, and will be bringing some typewriters to write with'.

Please, drop me a line if you're interested in coming at -

mailto:typeinbrisbane@icloud.com

 

 

The seductive allure of my Valentine.

Pardon my miss-use of 'your' below :-

 

It may seem twee to be writing about my Valentine typewriter on Valentine's day, but then again my disdain for my Valentine has been rather well documented.  

So it may surprise a few people that I revisited the Valentine, which hiding at the back of my collection, and found myself being both frustrated, and then seduced by this machine. 

*  *  *

It all started late last year on Facebook. Or more accurately, with a friend from my past. 

This friend had been seeking me out on Facebook, but I wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with them. With a click of the block button they were gone - out of my life, and I expected them to be out of my mind forever.

But they weren't out of my mind. The situation bugged me for days, and after a little while I decided that it was time to write to them, and express my frustrations and hurt and ask them not try to contact me again.

So, I rolled out my Valentine. I had mixed feelings of anger and sadness, and the Valentine seemed to be the right keyboard to take it out on. Before long I had paper loaded into the machine, and I was bashing out a note to my now rather ex friend.

The Valentine however, didn't survive the length of the letter. Its scratchy carriage continued to grind and moan at every press of the key, and the escapement occasionally jammed and condensed letters together to form a blob of words. 

By the second page, the machine gave up the ghost. One of the bearings that I had painfully re-inserted 6 months ago shot out of the carriage unexpectedly mid travel. But I continued to type on the machine with the carriage wobbling around in a rickety motion until the letter was done.

I finished the letter and pushed it into an envelope. The next day I grabbed all of my outgoing mail, and headed to my nearest Australia Post mailbox. But before I did, I left the letter typed on the Valentine behind on my desk.

I was now left with a wounded Valentine. After I'd previously re-assembled the carriage I had never been happy with the action of the machine, and I just had a feeling that it wasn't trustworthy and that feeling proved to be right. 

I mulled over the mechanism and I couldn't quite figure out what had happened. It seemed physically impossible for the machine to dump a bearing mid movement, and I couldn't see any signs to tell me what had actually happened. The best I could figure out was that bearings may have been worn down, or that the retainer had jammed in the middle of the movement - forcing the bearings to jam and push out the side of the retainer and shoot out of the typewriter.

Obviously this was going to need the bearings to be once again re-inserted. But I just didn't have the heart to do it again, so I tucked the Valentine back into my cupboard until I had the patience and the mindset to do so. 

*  *  *

A somewhat casual auction. Much more relaxed than ebay.

 In January I flicked through a catalog  for an antiques auction over in Woolloongabba and spotted an interesting Art Deco table that had been poorly photographed, but showed some real potential. I popped down on the day of the auction, and discovered quite a beautiful table. 

While the auction progressed I picked through the bits in the store-room for a couple of hours until the table come up for auction. I bid - and won - a stunning 1930's dining table for a whopping $30. It would have been $20, but a dealer put in a half-arsed $5 bid against my first bid, just to see if he could score it cheap. I'd budgeted for significantly more than $30 for this table, which was pretty obvious to the dealer after I countered his bid within seconds, and he dropped out out of the running as he wasn't really interested.

Furniture wasn't really selling that day, and most of the dealers that were there were looking for little things that could be sold at markets or along with other items in their stock. Oddly several sets of antique bottle openers sold for more than the table did. Jewelery seemed to be the hot item, while my table was the only table to sell for the day.

While I was digging around the storage room, I discovered an Olivetti Dora buried in a job lot. The machine worked brilliantly, but was in a horrible state. The case was water-damaged, and some of the plastic had fused to the plastic of the Dora's Shell - staining it yellow and making it appear as though it had been burned. Also along with the typewriter in the job-lot was a marvelous label maker.

I bid, and before long I was the excited owner of a Dora and a label maker with about 20 fresh rolls of tape for a bank-breaking $10.

I grabbed that, and a few other trinkets that I'd bought, loaded up Ruby the Exxy and headed for home. 

*   *   *

 When I bought the Dora, I have other ideas than adding it to my collection. I could have spent hours fruitlessly trying to do something to the shell of the Dora to make it look nice again, or.... I could just use it as a parts machine. When I got it home and typed on it a little I was surprised by how well it worked. It was actually quite a nice typewriter. So I reconsidered my course of action for a moment, but then just through to myself - 'the world isn't going to miss one ugly Dora', and I promptly started to deconstruct the machine's shell. 

From a mechanical point of view, this Dora was pretty good. However, it had been filled with silt and muck - most likely from being stored in someone's leaky shed, and was most going to need a lot of cleaning. Frankly, I couldn't be bothered scrubbing the whole thing out. I flipped the machine over, and after dropping out no more than 8 bolts and two springs, I pushed some levers aside and I had the part I needed. 

 There can be only one! (swings sword).

I speak of course, of the entire carriage. Not just the rails, not just the platen, not just the paper table etc. But the entire array.

I spoke to John on the phone about what I was doing. Speaking from his experienced Olivetti typewriter mechanic point of view, his comment was blunt: "Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread".

John was right, of course. I had no idea of the complexities involved with relocating an entire carriage into a new machine. But I sure didn't have any intention of putting myself through the grief of relocating the bearings again - particularly as there was clearly something very wrong with them.

But the job turned out to be quite simple. I ripped the Valentine's carriage out, and plonked the Dora's back into place quite quickly. I even gave everything a scrub along with a grease and oil change while I was at it, so all the important bits were well looked after and running very smoothly. it all seemed to be such a simple repair. I flipped it over, and before shoving the shell back on, I gave it a test run.

Of course, nothing worked. 

Okay... so... where do I start fixing this.

So, I flipped the machine over gain and loosened the bolts, screws and bits and pieces. Progressively things sort of worked as I fiddled with them, but adjusting things in one direction seemed to put something else out. So soon it got to the point where it occurred to me that the entire carriage array must need some kind complicated adjustment procedure performed to ensure that everything lined up correctly.

After a little bit of thinking, I thought I had come up with an idea on how to do this complicated adjustment procedure. I flipped over the machine and loosened off the 6 bolts retaining the carriage array to the side, then pressed down hard on the carriage while re-tightening the bolts with retaining this compressed state.

Aaaaaaaaaaand......

The Valentine worked perfectly.

Well, except for a couple of things that I had 'adjusted' earlier, which I had to screw back to where they originally had been.

I quickly bolted everything back together, chucked in the new ribbon that I had been using previously in the machine (I use a mostly dry ribbon while testing repairs) and give it a bit of a burl.

And you know what? After being serviced, cleaned and adjusted to death, this carriage would have to be the smoothest moving carriage I have ever found on an Olivetti. And I mean... this was SMOOTH. The plastic shell of the case which reverberated bumps and grinds previously, was now astonishingly quiet. Only my Hermes 3000 machines are smoother and quieter.

This was an outcome that was completely unexpected. So I quickly pushed in a few fresh pages of letterhead paper, and turned out a couple of long overdue letters to a couple of members of the typosphere.


And you know what? I actually quite enjoyed my time with my Valentine. There's some aspects to this machine that are a bit unrefined, but largely I found this typewriter to be a very competent typewriter. It isn't the pinnacle of typewriter engineering, but it was a surprisingly comfortable, quiet and stylish machine to use.

I'm not in love. Oh no.

But this is one Valentine that I'd be happy to go a round with twice a day, and three times on Sunday. (my overseas readers may not quite catch onto what I'm saying there).

*   *   *

The letter that I typed before I repaired the machine still hasn't been posted. It sits in a box - maybe for life. I may find a moment to burn it and let go of the memories of a long passed toxic friendship. In the meantime, I've gained an appreciation for a beautiful Valentine.

P.S. I used the shift keys from the Dora - which were the more modern Lettera 32 square style, to replace the missing shift key. I also replaced the non missing shift key as well, so everything matched up.

Just appreciating my typewriter a little.

 

Hmmm... Redundant phrasing... eat you heart out. I think I need some caffeine. I mean really... who writes without a caffeine hit next to them?

  

And the writer seems to have a few issues too.... Talk about questionable grammar.

Anyway. See you soon.

Throwing ink onto a page - hello ITAM!

 

We're doing ITAM again? Well, why didn't you say so!

Here's the machine that re-introduced me to the beauty of typewriters. 

Pardon the late night Monday fatigue grammar and rambling. 

And the odd side-step into bad poetry. 

 

You know... Every time I write on this machine, I'm surprised by how well it works! Sure, it's not a sexy Hermes super-model, and isn't built for speed. But it is a great machine.  It feels like an old workhorse, and I just.... love writing at it. I feel the writing.

.... and then the rains came.

Here in Brisbane, we have been enjoying  the fading end of ex tropical cyclone Oswald, which has been whipping up severe winds and dumping torrents of rain on us. Flood waters around Queensland are raising, and Brisbane is no exception.

It isn't as severe in Brisbane as it was in 2011, but things here have been a little bit rough. The high winds combined with the heavy rain, along with the unexpected addition of a series of tornadoes, has however made the last 36 hours quite entertaining.

So, I grabbed an on-hand typewriter an tapped out a typecast before I had breakfast this morning.

Pine river flooded rapidly as they dumped water from the dam, as the tide in the bay pushed a storm surge back up river. 

We crossed through this flooded section of the road yesterday before we came across an even deeper flooded road that was risky to cross.  Just for reference, the river is off to the left. That section to the right is a flooded gully.