missy20201 wrote:

I'm still perfecting my typewriter typing technique (it's... very different from a computer. Goodbye, 80 wpm!). But I will say, my '39 KMM and '51 SC Silent are very forgiving with me, but my '53 QDL is just brutal. I start typing too quickly with imperfect strokes and suddenly letters are squashed and there are random spaces in my words... Gah. It's got the smoothest carriage and is fun to use, but it's a real picky thing! 

Yes, a common experience with the Royals, and the QDLs especially, it would seem. They're so darn smooth that they seem to encourage you to type faster than the machine can handle -- resulting in the crowding of letters and skipping. So you have to maybe type a little more smoothly, knowing that these have this tendency. Is the left margin consistent, or does it sometimes not line up at the same point? That's another quirk of these machines, one that isn't the fault of the user.