Scott wrote:

...A couple of decades ago the professor of journalism at the University of Oregon passed and he willed his daily journal the the school of journalism. The grad students who fetched his journal returned with more than 75,000 typed pages. It was a Mother Lode.

Let's see... two hundred pages/day for a year or ten pages a day for twenty years --  250 three-hundred page binders, around forty shelf feet. I wonder if he backed it up electronically or left it to fate whether it would survive him? 

As for favorite typewriter to type on, that would be the one I just repaired and have in front of me or forgot about and pulled out again; a beat up machine that still typed strong or a nimble machine or a clear printing machine or a machine which still had a hint of that new old stock typewriter smell. A centenarian Underwood which led a hard working life with worn off logos and indented anvil which still whacks out a clear and precise Edwardian script on the paper. At least it would occupy that niche until it makes my fingertips hurt -- variety is the spice of typing.  

I've had a number of typewriters with feeble bells. The most common cause (for me) was a stem which left the clapper (striker) touching the bell after the strike, which damps the vibration.  As M. Hohne says, inspection normally reveals the cause, particularly on older typewriters with open frames. I've dealt with several I was not able to fix. For pages and pages it's a deal killer, but if you just want to write a letter you can cock a weather eye at the page and get a peripheral feel for how close you are. When the bell works I've learned to overcome the temptation to squeeze in just one more word -- as if the paper were platinum or something. Now I return as soon as possible to avoid time wasted with margin release. Typewriter bells never seem to get louder with age - must be some facet of the second law of thermodynamics - they always get feebler or stop working altogether. 

 

Pete E., hope that arrives OK for you. I've had three of these sent to me and two arrived damaged - shifted and hit the front member, which is their Achilles heel (or one of them). One of them hit so hard the sides of the frame were started slightly and some cross member had popped out, if I recall correctly. I was in an energetic mood that day and managed to straighten it. Don't think I could have managed that today.

Hi Lau,

Interesting question, one I too am interested in - I was offline when you asked.

Here is what the words suggest to me, which is the same as they would suggest with a piano. The action is the sum total of all the bits and pieces which translate the motion of the finger into a flying hammer which finally hits the string. The touch of a piano is how the key feels under your finger, but the word "action" is sometimes used for this, for example: Ted sits down to play an unfamiliar piano and pronounces "Nice action". He has no idea about the bits moving under the hood and means how the piano feels to his fingers. There is no doubt a word for this turn of speech, where the whole represents the part, or in this case, an attribute or consequence of the whole. So I would use the words in the same way relating to a manual typewriter, and indeed the analogy seems exact: a mechanical linkage translates the travel of our finger into the motion of a hammer which strikes the paper. But in a way when a person remarks on the action of a typewriter or piano which he has felt under his fingers, that person is referring to both: the feedback of the action feels a certain way under his fingers, and the feedback of the action to a certain power stroke of the player/typist is determined by the detail bits of the mechanical action.

I meant this to be a short answer, but many answers which seem short in the mind become larger in the telling.

Now, what determines the "action" of a piano or typewriter, in the sense of what we more specifically call the touch: the tactile feedback to the user's fingertips? You mentioned what is known as "touch control" and that, to me, is a very limited aspect of the touch and one whose fine adjustment does not much interest me as a typist. Touch control in my experience is always about a higher or lower effective spring tension on the key. I think of this as primarily an advertising gimmick; a poor action is never rescued by fine adjustment of spri

If a picture is worth a thousand words and my question suggests n untaken pictures, should I instead write n thousand words, and does it make any sound?

The Problem

Hermes 3000 square body, has seen significant use and its carriage knobs seem to have been replaced in the past (beige knobs to not match mint green keys, levers and buttons). All works as it should with the exception that every few paragraphs the lefthand carriage knob works its way out sufficiently to disengage the line space mechanism, and I find myself typing over the last line. The basic function -- out/release, in/engage -- works.

The Odyssey

Remove left knob with set screw on (outer) hub, pull the inner hub off the end of the shaft. Oh #$%$. Two leaf springs fall out. Leaf springs have a slight v-bend in them near the distal tip, a indent which spells D*E*T*E*N*T, and that means trouble, right here in Hermes City.  So, I say to myself says I, the detent function is not strong enough and that's why the inner hub is creeping out with the cumulative bump of carriage returns, and I set out to make the detent stronger by bending the springs into a more aggressive shape.

I start out slow and at first, nothing much happens. Bend them more and more and finally, It Makes Things Worse. Yes the knob seems to show increase resistance to being pulled out, but now a tiny bit of movement away from the carriage, far less than you would expect, releases the carriage.

Further consideration and solicitation of mechanical insight.... ah, ah, ah.... ah hah!  Maybe it's the ends of the leaf springs themselves which engage the hidden inner mechanism which engages the line spacing and, by bending the #$(*% out of them, I have shortened them so they disengage with a tiny amount of linear movement! Not giving up my earlier detent hypothesis entirely I now straighten one of the two springs and leave the other with the aggressive indent. It seems to work. I still have as much detent action as a boy coul