thetypewriterman wrote:

I'm sure that the clipper oil will be fine.  The best stuff to use on any typewriter (even modern plastic wedges like yours) is Sewing Machine oil - which is practically identical to the now-unobtainable typewriter oil.  Never, never be tempted to use WD-40 or similar 'lubricants', which only make things worse in the long run.

Yes I do have some WD-40 but luckily I've been reading around the subject of typewriter maintenance for long enough that I knew it's the last thing you should use in the basket of a manual to loosen type bars, so I played it safe and assumed I probably shouldn't use it on plastic cogs either.

I'm not actually sure what's in clipper oil, I just presumed it's designed for parts that move rapidly a huge number of times between applications so maybe it was okay here; though I worried a bit about applying it to plastic when clearly its normal application is to metal.

My Actionwriter came with a continuous ink ribbon cassette. At first I thought there was a patch of ribbon which had no ink on it, because roughly every 2 pages no characters were printed for say 50 keystrokes.

But after trying 2 more ribbons, this time carbon film, and having the same problem, I realised it's probably a fault with the typewriter. I searched for known issues & fixes on the Internet, and at least one other person had asked the same question but there was no answer, so I figured I would post this fix here. At least it seems to be a fix so far!

See photo:



When a key is struck, the whole metal platform holding the cassette lifts up and the piece of plastic A moves forwards, rotating the cog B (under the metal platform) to advance the ribbon. You can see I've put a tiny bit of red marker on the upper cog connected to it (that one slots into the cassette), so I could see if it ever stopped rotating. Sure enough, when typing fast, it occasionally stopped rotating.

It turns out that the piece of plastic A didn't always reliably return to place after moving forward. Moving it forward by hand, it often stuck in the forward position for a moment or two before sliding back. I wondered if it was dragging on the bit of metal below it so used a bit of oil there - no difference. Then I wondered if the unwanted friction was between the bit of plastic and the cog that it was rotating, or thereabouts,  so I put a drop of oil on the cog B and quickly pressed lots of keys to rotate it and spread the oil around.

After that, whenever I move A forward, it reliably returns immediately. So far the Actionwriter has been working fine.

I am not sure what the best type of oil to use was; I had some Wahl Clipper (as in hair trimmer) oil, and used a drop of that. Not sure how long it will last or if it will cause issues?

I am exactly nerdy enough to measure the length of a wheelwriter ribbon and work out how many characters it might be expected to print. But I haven't reached the end of my current ribbon so I haven't done that yet.

However the ribbon cassette for my *actionwriter* does specify the ribbon length to be 200ft. I don't know if I've made a mistake in my maths, but the stats for that turn out to be quite disappointing.

I have a Pica (10 cpi) wheel in the Actionwriter - not sure if that makes a difference to how far the ribbon is advanced per character. Anyway I measure 10 characters to use up 3cm of ribbon. So I think that means a ribbon might last for 20330 characters. If an average word length is 5.1 characters then that equates to 3986 words.

Ignoring corrections, that means if you were to magically manage to type up a polished version of your 60,000 word novel, you would eat through 16 cassettes. That doesn't sound too bad for a novel, because the word "novel" makes you think of something with lots and lots of words.

But I use it for drafting, I use the defaults of 1 inch margin all around, I use a pica font and I have double line spacing. So each page is quite sparse, i.e. not very demanding on ribbon usage, and, just gut feel before I did any calculations: I thought it would be nice to get say 100 pages from a ribbon.

But I counted 300 words on a sample page, so that's just 13 pages of very sparse text from one ribbon. And if you are not using double spacing, you could expect as little as 6 pages of A4 from one ribbon.

This seems rather low; I'd like to think I've got the maths wrong but I think it's about right.

I wonder if you get much more from a wheelwriter cassette? They are certainly bigger. And the high yield versions suggest they get 70% more than the high quality ones (I'm talking IBM originals). I have no idea what the aftermarket ribbon lengths are compared to IBM originals. But as I say I am exactly nerdy enough to measure these things as and when

I forgot the link to the website I was using for the colour wheel info: 

https://www.sessions.edu/color-calculator/

There's a box there where you can type in #0d8a6f - as I say, on my monitor at least, that's very close to what I see in real life.

Uwe wrote:

Were it me, I'd try to match the colour used for the key and function labels. "Blue and green should never be seen," comes to mind here. And if not the exact blue, at least a complimentary colour (use a colour wheel).

I'm not familiar with plastic dyes, so this is all very interesting. For my painting needs I've always used products that were specifically formulated for plastic - and which cost a fraction of the price.

I do like the idea of matching the highlight colours used on the function keys; I was hoping this green would be reasonably close at a glance. None of the images I've shown really seem the same as real life, but studying the photos does make the function colours look far more blue. In real life, with hindsight, I'd say the colour is something like teal; either way, green is way off.

I've just done some very crude photoshopping, sampling the highlight colour on the LCD display, and filling the green case with that so it matches perfectly within the photo, if still not quite reflecting reality.

This is the original photo:



This is the photoshopped one:



I'd say that colour works better than the green at a distance, and starts to make even more sense when you are up close and can see the colours on the screen panel and the keys. I'm not too sure that it gets around the problem that, generally, it's still a big mass of dark colour, with much lighter colours for the keyboard and screen area.

There is a vinyl dye available which comes very close to how that second photo looks: https://www.vinyldye.co.uk/Brillo%20Vinyl%20Spray%20Dye%20Light%20Navy?search=blue

I can't see a teal colour though. Still, I think the Navy in the link will be a better match than the avocado!