Repartee wrote:

I guess the philosophy was that if you were in Irkutsk, say, and it would take three months to get a replacement spring it would keep working on the remaining one until help arrived. You want to be able to keep working in Irkutsk, so long as the vodka holds. 

  Yeah. Boy. Tell me about it! I couldn't wait for Spring in Irkutsk!

Uwe wrote:

TypewriterKing wrote:

Had a thought: I saw the picture of where the spring was attached--onto a post up above. Is there by chance an eyelet under that post?

As Beak explained in post #21, the spring had slipped out of its adjustment bolt. The underside of the bolt that you see in his photo has an oversized head with a hole drilled through it, and the end of the spring loops through the hole.

That's what I thought.  However, he already made the repair the way he did, either because he didn't find this hole, or it was somehow inaccessible, or that part of the bolt had somehow got torn away.
 

TypewriterKing wrote:

That's what I thought. However, he already made the repair the way he did, either because he didn't find this hole, or it was somehow inaccessible, or that part of the bolt had somehow got torn away.
 

Again, as Beak stated in that post, he had temporarily hooked the spring over the top of the bolt to give himself time to figure out how he was going to properly thread it back into the bolt hole. It was only then that he discovered that the temporary position of the spring had solved the shift problem he was experiencing.