1 - BrettEnget
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Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
Ok, so I'm fairly new to typewriters; haven't owned one in 20 years give or take, and I recently bought a Brother Cassette Correct-o-Riter portable electric off of eBay. It worked fine until I changed out the ribbon. Now, if I have it set to print instead of correct, half of the character prints, i.e. if I punch in a semi-colon, it appears as a comma. The ink ribbon is the same width as the previous one, if a bit longer. Ink-wise, it's fine, what little of the letter appears on the page is still as dark as it was when the ribbon was brand new. I have no idea what the problem is.
I'm tempted to think it's the vibrator, because I can pull it up and get a clean strike, but it never pops up that high by itself. Any ideas?
- ztyper
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
I would clean the typewriter some more, especially the ribbon vibrator mechanism. Usually Q-tips and alcohol works well for getting off grime and dust.
A high schooler with a lot of typewriters. That's pretty much about it.
- TypewriterGuy
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
Try cleaning the ribbon vibrator. Also, typewriters will start to break more and more the less they are used, so some use may fix it.
Back from a long break.
Starting fresh with my favorite typer. A Royal Futura!
- Spazmelda
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
Do you still have the cassette you took out? If you out that back in, does it still only print half a letter? If it is at the end of the ribbon, I believe you can manually rewind it a bit to check this out, trying to narrow down here, is it simply some issue with the new cassette or is it something else that happened coincidentally when you changed the cassette.
- BrettEnget
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
Well I've cleaned the vibrator and I think the problem lies in the ribbon. It's a universal ribbon that I wound into the original cassette, but it's not working quite right for some reason. The original ribbon was slightly cockeyed; the right hand side is supposed to be higher going through the vibrater than the left hand side and I cannot get the ribbon to cooperate. I don't know if it's not tight enough or what the deal is. Seriously considering buying an adapter to just get rid of the cassette altogether.
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Thread Starter- Spazmelda
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
I'm entirely unfamiliar with this cassette type of typewriter. I have a '89 Brother Correctronic that uses a cassette, but it is a carbon ribbon (and this is what I was picturing when I suggested manually rewinding the ribbon). Can you post a link to a picture?
Does your typewriter have a color selector? If so, and if you are using an all black ribbon, you might be able to put the selector on red to get the tops of the letters to show. Kind of a hack, but it would at least get you typing while you are waiting for an adapter. Are those easily found (adapters, I mean)?
Last edited by Spazmelda (20-7-2015 21:44:02)
- BrettEnget
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
I posted several pictures of the beast, the cassette and the problem I'm having here on my blog.
It has a color selector sort of. It was designed for a dual-colored correction ribbon, the top half basically white out and the bottom the black. I put a solid black ribbon on when I replaced it, figuring why bother with a correction side when I have white out in a bottle. I can type in correct, but I'm having the issue now that the vibrator isn't coming back down in correct; it pops up super high but never comes back down and I'm afraid the ribbon will bind up or something. I've managed to find one guy who sells the adapters for nearly $50, which is almost as much as I bought the whole machine for.
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Thread Starter- Spazmelda
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
It's throwing me off that white was on the top...
It looks from the pictures of your type that there is a significant alignment issue, where the lower case letters are much higher than the uppercase. Is that the case? The uppercase letters also seem to be printing fine on top, perhaps because they are lower. Could it be that the alignment of the lowercase is so off that's causing the problem?
Last edited by Spazmelda (20-7-2015 22:39:41)
- BrettEnget
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
Alignment was my inital thought, because you're right; capitals are printing fine. Unfortunately, I've no friggin' clue how to adjust it on this machine.
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Thread Starter- Spazmelda
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Re: Brother Electric cutting the tops off letters?
Oi, I don't either. I just know that the type alignment would drive me crazy if it were that off. I mean, if I got the ribbon height adjusted so all the letters were printing correctly, and the lowercase were still so high it would seriously just drive me over the edge and I'd be on a mission to adjust the alignment. Since it seems likely that adjusting the alignment might take care of both problems, that's what I'd go for first, but that's just me and my OCD. Unfortunately, I don't have a clue how to adjust it, so I would be in the same place you are. I tried looking and really couldn't find much on this typewriter at all. I can find information on how to adjust alignment on various manual typewriters, so that's probably where I would start and see if I could find any similarities in design that would give me a clue. Sorry, I wish I could help more!
