It’s never the faint letter

No. 9 came out of an estate sale in Dade City, off a card table in a carport, between a box of jigsaw puzzles and a waffle iron. A Royal Quiet De Luxe in gray crinkle paint, by the look of it early fifties. The case latch worked. The carriage moved. The woman running the sale said it had belonged to the lady of the house, who typed the church bulletin on it, and that it “just needs a ribbon.” Every typewriter at every sale just needs a ribbon.

I ran my line through it on the lanai before it ever came inside. That’s the top strip. Look at box, dozen, and liquor: the x is a ghost, the z is half there, the r barely showed up. My first thought, and I’d bet most people’s, was that the x, the z, and the r were the trouble. Dirty type, or weak bars.

They’re fine. The trouble is the o. And the e, and the u.

It took me an embarrassing two evenings to see it. Each typebar sits in its own slot in the segment, and it has to fall back out of the way before the next one comes up. On this machine somebody, at some point in the last seventy years, had oiled the segment. Oil in a segment turns to varnish. The bars that get used most had the most gum in their slots, and the vowels get used most. They went up fine, because a finger was pushing them. They came back slow, because nothing sends a bar home but a light spring and its own weight.

So the o prints, starts for home in no hurry, and the x comes up and meets it on the way. The x arrives late and soft. On the page it looks like the x is sick.

I wrote the rule on a card and stuck it over the bench: when a letter is faint only some of the time, look at the letter before it.

What I did

A segment flush, the plain way. I laid the machine on its back on the lanai with a folded towel under the carriage and shop rags stuffed below the segment to catch what ran through. Mineral spirits from a needle-tip squeeze bottle, a few drops into a slot from the top, then I worked that one key forty or fifty times until the bar snapped back instead of drifting back. Then the next slot. Every bar, one at a time. The rags came out the color of strong tea.

Second evening, the same thing again, because the first pass loosens gum that the second pass carries off. After that it sat open under the ceiling fan for a full day so the spirits could leave on their own.

No oil went back in. That’s the whole lesson of this machine. The slots run dry, steel on steel, and they’re happy that way. I’ve read people who put a little graphite in there and I’m not going to argue with them, but I haven’t needed to.

While it was open I brushed out the type. The e and the a had their bowls about half filled in, which you can also see in the top strip. Then a fresh black-and-red ribbon, and a wipe of the paint with a damp rag and nothing stronger.

What I didn’t fix

The bell is weak. It rings, but it sounds like somebody tapping a glass in the next room. I can see the clapper and it moves, so my guess is the bell itself is touching something, and I couldn’t find what.

I also left the chip in the paint on the ribbon cover, and the dull spot on the frame where her right hand rested for however many years of bulletins. That stays.

Four evenings, counting the one I spent blaming the wrong letters.