1 of 1- ennisa
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Offline - Registered: 27-3-2016
- Posts: 10
olypmia reporter letter alignment
Hi Folks,
I just picked up an olympia reporter. Not the reporter deluxe but the beige reporter. Same as this fella here in fact i wouldn't be surprised if that is the exact machine. I would like to ask you for your advice on a couple of matters though:
Maintenance: She types fine, sounds ok, no weird noises but is there any basic maintenance that I should be doing, anything need a drop of oil etc..?
Type alignment: The upper and lower case are pretty dramatically out of alignment, with the tops of the uppercase letters lining up almost with the tops of the lower case letters. Can anybody give me tips on how to align those on this machine? I'm a DIYer and don't have the funds to bring it to a service shop, there is only one in Dublin anyway and I can only imagine what they charge for servicing. I did try to take the case off to see if it needed a brush out, as I would have done with all my manual machines. Removed the 4 screws but couldn't work out how to get the top half off over the carriage. I don't know if there is a particular carriage position, or if it uses the flex in the case or if the carriage just has to be removed to get at the insides.
As always, thank you for your wisdom.
Alan
Ireland/Dublin
- ennisa
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Re: olypmia reporter letter alignment
Type sample from this machine.
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Thread Starter- thetypewriterman
- Key Master
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- From: Leiston, England
- Registered: 29-5-2013
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Re: olypmia reporter letter alignment
Your Olympia was actually made in Japan by Nakajima. Your alignment problem is due to some hard rubber washers on the shift stops having deteriorated and broken up. I have seen this problem before, and made some new ones by punching out some thick polythene with a set of wad punches. However, if you are not a typewriter engineer, you might find access a bit tricky. Another problem on these machines is that the rubber belt between the motor and the power shaft tends to stretch and go slack with age, leading to intermittent loss of drive, often when operating the carriage return. There are no new belts available. Maybe its not worth spending too much time or effort on this - stick to manual typewriters instead !
- ennisa
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Re: olypmia reporter letter alignment
thetypewriterman, thanks for the reply. I understand your reservations but I am more enamored with the "electric assist" machines than i thought I would be and this one has a nice keys so I am enjoying it. I'm always willing to have a go to fix something and have just enough experience to be dangerous 
Do you recall how the case is removed on these? Does the carriage need to be removed or will it come off over the carriage with right amount of manipulation?
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Thread Starter- thetypewriterman
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- Registered: 29-5-2013
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Re: olypmia reporter letter alignment
To be honest, I cannot remember. But I do have a scrap machine like yours, and if I can find the time over the next few days, I'll have a look and will let you know !
- ennisa
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Re: olypmia reporter letter alignment
thetypewriterman; you are very kind, but please don't go to any trouble.
Alan
Ireland/Dubiln
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Thread Starter- thetypewriterman
- Key Master
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- From: Leiston, England
- Registered: 29-5-2013
- Posts: 897
Re: olypmia reporter letter alignment
I don't know how much help this will be, since my 'scrap' machine is a much earlier version with a square-ish outer casing. On that one at least, it looks as if the upper casing will wriggle past the carriage bed, once the fixing screws are undone. The carriage certainly isn't an easily-removeable item on these models, so there has to be a way of getting the casing of without disturbing it. My guess (without seeing your machine) is that maybe the bottom half of the casing comes off first, thus giving you more scope for moving the top casing around to wriggle it past the carriage. Good luck 
- ennisa
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Re: olypmia reporter letter alignment
so thank you to thetypewriterman for his help, wouldn't have been too sure what i was looking for without his advice. I managed to get it all sorted out.
The top case comes off very easily once you take the bottom off first, it leaves lots of room to manouver. I didn't want to take off the bottom initially because I thought the 4 screws on the bottom may be holding on some electronics components. Once I had a good look two things became obvious.
1 these screws were just holding the case onto the bottom
2 there are very little "electronics" in this machine.
So I got it naked and had a look about and found the 2 pads that thetypewriter man was referring to and they were actually still in there and they looked to be not too bad. It was when i was moving the mechanism around and seeing how it worked that I noticed that the screw that the pad was mounted on the end of actually had a slot in the other end of it.
it looked like it was adjustable. It was being held in place by a nut, so i went looking for a driver that would fit this and it turns out that it is 5.5mm don't ask me why i have one, it was in my bag of 'stuff'. 
The adjustment screw itself is down between the carriage and the ribbon reverser, in the pic below the toothed edge is the carriage slide.
it was at this point that i realised that you can do this adjustment without removing anything on the machine, so i loosened up the nut and then gave the screw a couple of turns, did thet same on the other side and then tested. Then repeated to get things lined up. There is very little adjustment left in the screw so I would say that that bumper pad was at one time much more substantial. Although actually if you were really stuck you could start moving the lowercase down and meeting them in the middle, it looks like that is what the set screw beside this one is supposed to do. A lot of moving parts with that solution though.
I tightened back up the nuts and she was good to go. Actually the nuts were really tight when i went to loosen them up, i had to get a pliers to turn the driver for extra leverage, these nuts look pretty soft too so be careful that you don't round them out. also the whole righty tighty, lefty loosy is really hard to work out when things are upside down.
Anyway things look good now, not perfect but honestly I don't want to mess around too much with it. It's close enough for government work.
Typing sample is below, you can compare that to the one above in the previous post. in the yellow box you can see as i adjusted it and things started to come in line, baselines of the upper case started to match up to the lower case.
Hopefully this will help somebody else out if they come looking for something similar.
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Thread Starter- Uwe
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- From: Toronto, Canada
- Registered: 12-3-2013
- Posts: 4,408
Re: olypmia reporter letter alignment
Great job, and thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm sure it will benefit someone else some day.
The pronoun I has always been capitalized in the English language for more than 700 years.
