If you have needle nose pliers and regular pliers those help ALOT for straightening things...

And hey what do you know! I guess my little story about my Futura was kind of right... Those pesky tab set and clear mechanisms... 

TypewriterGuy wrote:

It always amazes me how parts INSIDE or on the bottom of the typewriter get bent or damaged.. I mean who goes inside of a typewriter and bends stuff? I don't think it could have happened accidentally.

I agree. I favor the frustrated-fist-slamming-on-the-keys scenario, since IT managed to damage the entire linkage. Not quite sure how this could do that kind of damage to the front bar, however, since pressing the key pulls the bar. Can a sharp over-stress in tension cause that kind of distortion? I shall hammer the remaining keys to find out!!! 

Just kidding. I had been looking for an opening for the "angry" emoticon.

That kind of research might be useful, but it would require careful review by the typewriter ethics board.

We join our story already in progress...

As you may recall, my SM-7 had some mechanical interference preventing the carriage from returning all the way to the lower rest position, as well as some other issues. Peering into its underside, we had eventually discovered a mangled linkage which turned out to be tab set, and disconnected part of it only to discover that the links disappearing further into the frame were jammed.

So tonight I took off the back plate...


and we see the tab set and clear linkages on the left and the right respectively, the grey part clamped to the blue cross piece being the jammed part which was as far as I got last time.

After some more pondering 'n such I thought I had discovered the coup de grace, the smoking gun, and the weltanschauen all wrapped up in one!


The arm on the grey piece is supposed to pull the silver lever forward when the tab set key is pressed... but it can't, because it's on the wrong side! Wow! I thought I was going to have a good day then I tell you! Only way this could have happened is some prior amateur repair person whom I can now feel superior to removed it, and replaced it incorrectly. So I put it back together correctly and reconnected the linkage, and now the tab set linkage works - except for the fact that it's so bent up nearby keys bind on it.

Unfortunately, the other problems were still intact. 

The ribbon vibrator not working correctly being one problem I removed the shield and... I think the interference with the carriage position resulted via some linkage with the ribbon vibrator, which occasionally got caught in the far up position. I found a flat spring behind the ribbon vibrator whose function is apparently to push it off this caught position (which couldn't they just design it not to get caught?) and tweaked that some, but I am still left with the following problems:

1) ribbon vibrator does not move in most combinations of case and ribbon position or does not move far enough. 
2) the carriage position/upper/lower case alignment issue is worst than ever 

I don't think this machine has even been abused. I think it has been deliberately sabotaged!

The vibrator does occasionally work as it should for a few keystrokes, so I am wondering if the solution is to use a really dangerous and obnoxious quantity of mineral spirits laced with oil to flush the machine out, on the theory that intermittent function means something somewhere is binding, which I can't get to or discover.

The carriage position thing really has me confused right now, and probably I am having some transient rationality failure, but... when it had been binding, I thought I had been able to push it down far enough so lower case letters typed in about the right place. But now they are typing below the line of the scales on the side shield - which means the carriage is too high, right? - but there is no possible downward adjustment. It's still not resting on the lower set screws, and looking around I see it is resting on some hard stops built directly into the frame. So it can't go any lower. But how can this be? And how could there have been enough vertical play before so I could hold it in a position where the lower case letters were correctly vertically positioned. 

This has me stumped. Please tell me I am thinking about something backwards or something so I can slap my forehead and move on. What could even a deliberate saboteur do to a machine so that typing lower case letters in the right place was out of the range of adjustment?