Dear Treefaller,

Thank you kindly for your advice.
I finally had the time to take a look at the machine today and give what you said a try. I think I found the pinion gear nut and was able to modify it slightly. However, I loosened it a bit too much, and caused the carriage to move around freely (meaning the gear didn't 'catch' the carriage anymore). This did cause the growling to stop, so I'm now fairly certain this gear caused the growling in the first place... 

But!... As I was tinkering along, the drawband for the carriage snapped!
Which means I have a more serious problem to tackle now...

I think what I'll do is find help from a professional as I don't quite feel up to the task of reattaching a drawband.

 

Dear Treefaller,

Thanks again for your advice and words of encouragement.
I will give fixing the drawstring (I only now realize the correct term is drawstring not band) using fishing line. Once I've done that, I'll give fixing the growling another try. 

Drawband = flat fabric strap, usually found on heavy-duty portables and standard office-sized machines.
Drawcord = round cord, usually found on small portable typewriters.

Both do the same thing, i.e. transmit the pulling force from the mainspring/spring drum to the carriage.  Hope this helps

Hi everyone,

Today I took some time to give this Lettera 32 another try. And succeeded!
Just wanted to report on this and let you guys know how I did it. Just in case someone else has a problem with a lettera, they'll know what to try first.

What I actually did was take apart almost everything because I wanted to take a look under the carriage. And indeed that did help me pinpoint the problem but wasn't really necessary in my case.

Re-assembling the carriage was a pain, but I got it done.
I wouldn't have been able to do it without the incredibly helpful blogbpost by typebarhead in which he does the exact same thing: http://typebarhead.blogspot.nl/2012/05/adventures-in-typewriter-repairs-2.html.
Getting the balls in place was very tricky, and I had to re-do it mulitple because I didn't put the carriage lock mechanism in place properly, and due to some other mistakes I made along the way. 
After that was back in place, I had to sort out all the tab, carriage lockthing, linelock mechanics etc.. I'm glad I had an extra Olivetti here to make sense of everything because a few springs got loose also, and stupid as I am, I didn't take any pictures that were clear enough to show all the individual parts...
Oh and also the drawband shot loose a few times. But thankfully, I already knew how to do that, and am now actually dexterous enough to do it without any assistance from an extra set of hands.

As for the growling and carriage blockage issues, they are now all gone!

When I took of the carriage I cleaned the escape mechanism and everything around it. I didn't see anything blocking the wheel and the pivot was in the correct position, if I lowered it any further, it wouldn't catch the rail and any tighter it would be completely stiff.
But when I put the carriage on to try everything after cleaning, I noticed exactly where the problem was caused.

I'm not sure whether non-moving pictures really can show what's going on, but this is the left side (the 'growling' side)


As you can sort of see, the teeth of the wheel don't quite 'catch' the rail.

This here is the right side (where I didn't have any problems moving the carriage around and the 'growling' was significantly less than on the right side).

This is how it is supposed to be.

So what I did, just out of plain curiosity and ignorance, is, I screwed off the carriage rail on the side it was causing trouble. 


Having unscrewed it, I played around with the rail on the wheel a bit, and found that this was exactly what I was looking for.
Not really knowing what to do next, I just re-attached it.
Thinking to myself how on earth one should fix that rail, I noticed that when I had it screwed on again, the growling disappeared and so had any issues!
The wheel now 'took' on every part of the rail!

So eventually, all the taking apart of the carriage and everything that comes with it, wasn't even necessary! (although it did give me some experience that might come in handy in the future)