For what it's worth, you can easily rearrange the hammers in those machines.  There's one bar that holds them in place which can be slid out to free them.  Just a guess, someone in the distant past customized that typewriter themselves, rather than the factory.

KatLondon wrote:

Now our machines are elderly - they've had all the heavy use, and all the neglect, and instead of a nice service contract they have an amateur with a few Q tips, a screwdriver and a tweezer!

I sort of see it in the opposite way... The typewriters which would have broken after a few years of use have been recycled long ago.  The machines that have survived this far are the well-built ones, which have shrugged off decades of hard use and abuse.  Anything we do to them isn't likely to break them since they've been through it all a hundred times.

That said, I'm a dragger not a thrower.  Sheer typing speed isn't important when I'm hammering something out on a typewriter (computers are for speed).  It's more about taking my time and experiencing it.
 

Sadly, most things just make more sense to do on a computer for me, so not a whole lot gets typed.  My kids actually use the typewriter a lot though - they do schoolwork on it, write stories, all sorts of things.

Speaking of which, recently I've been typing out my kids' excuse notes and other things they need to bring in with them to school.  There are probably a few people at their school who think our family is completely nuts, but so far they haven't mentioned it to us.