Hi Pete

You did what you could and I thank you for your effort. Sometimes things don't work out the way we would like them to, so I'll keep my eyes open and an ear to the ground. All the best,

Sky

Hi Olivier

From what I have read and gathered from some of our learned forum members, 2 pounds or 900 grams force on the carriage at mid-point seems to be an accepted norm for most typewriters. To get a true reading, the carriage rails need to be clean and correctly lubricated, and the carriage release lever tied down so the carriage is free to slide either way.

The draw tension is then measured with an accurate spring scale or balance holding the carriage at mid point of the travel. Draw tension will increase to the right hand end of the travel as the mainspring gets more tightly wound and less  towards the left hand end of travel as the spring unwinds. (The opposite will hold true if you have a machine that types from right to left, such as a Hebrew typewriter). Hope this points you in the right direction,

Sky

Hi GJK

A couple of things to remember about the Remington Noiseless typewriter. 1, The keys do not thrust the type slugs all the way to the platen like your Smith-Corona Stirling. 2, the concept of noiseless is the type slugs just kiss the platen without making the thud or clack of a regular typewriter.

There is also the possibility that the platen has hardened and shrunk very slightly so the momentum imparted to the type bars by the key mechanism isn't quite enough to make a dark impression. My first suggestion would be to try using a piece of 32 pound (120 g/m²) paper as a backing sheet behind your typing paper and see if that helps. All the best,

Sky

Hi Rob

Getting it apart would be the easy part, file or grind off the 4 tabs from one side or the other and the spring drum will come apart. The hard part would then be to get the drum to stay together once you've reassembled it as there will not be enough metal left on the tabs to swage over again. One alternative would be to take it to a clock maker/repair shop to see if they can give you any suggestions, or repair the spring/drum for you. All the best,

Sky

Hi Olivier

How about we get back to the original question of this thread. I have had to answer the question about what the Margin-Release (M-R) key does so many times, that I wrote up what I believe to be an understandable explanation of the M-R key function. See what you think:

The MR key gets many people confused as they don't understand its purpose. When you are typing on your computer, you select the page size from the list of pre-set sizes - letter, legal, A4, A5 and so on. Then you set or select the margins on the page and start typing. If you type a word that's going to go over the margin, the word wraps round to the next line down and you keep typing. When you've finished, you save and send to print, job complete.

On a manual typewriter, the page size is set by the piece of paper you insert into the machine, we'll use standard 8½" x 11" letter size for now. You've set the paper guide to zero, the left margin to 10 and the right margin to 75 on a pica (10 CPI) machine and you're typing happily away, then you hear a bell go ding. This bell tells you that you are only a few spaces (usually 4 to 8 depending on the machine) from the right margin.

Because a typewriter can't word-wrap, you have to be constantly thinking a sentence ahead of what you're typing. If you've just started typing a long word when you hear the bell, you know you only have a few spaces left before you hit the right margin and the machine locks up, so you'll have to hyphenate the word at a suitable point and type the rest of the word on the next line.

Some words however must not be hyphenated, the word that comes to mind is "therapist". If you've just started typing that word and you hear the line end warning bell a you type the letter 'T', do you hyphenate to The- rapist, or Thera- pist, neither of which are acceptable. Instead, you type Therapi and the typewriter locks up. Now you press the MR (margin release) key once and finish the word before returning for the next line.

The MR ke