Ready for typewriter spay-day tomorrow.
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Looking good!  

Always nice when these issues clear up by themselves although the deep clean and oiling probably helped.  Looks a good day's work.

Finished...for now.

The red portion of my new ribbon is leaving some streaks of red on the paper when I am typing in black...streaks being left below the typed line.  May have to do some gentle reforming of the ribbon lift arm.  It is one of those 1-sided, asymmetrical arms pivoting on the right side of the machine.

The new silk ribbon is on the juicy side...so will give it some time to dry out before I go bending anything.

Is it a great machine ? Probably not...but a very good one.  I like my Erika Model 40 more than this Underwood 450 in terms of performance and typing experience.  But the 450 is sleek & sexy...

p.s.  I looked at my ribbon routing on the right side...and mistakenly had it routing behind the pivoting arm.  Once I got it routing in front of the arm, my red smudge-issue went away.
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Found out, today, that the Underwood 450 does indeed have a touch-control lever under the ribbon cover along the left side.

The Olivetti Studio 45 has it, but I thought it was missing on the Underwood 450.

Metal lever that has 3 positions.  I set my machine at the middle-setting.  Lever moves up for the light touch and down for medium  and heavy touch.
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duna wrote:

Hi Pete,
> 80 Characters ===> 208 mm in length
oh wow. Oh wow. Underwood too, then. I just got an 1963-1964 very early Olivetti Lettera 32 ... tomorrow will measure that machine typeface as well but I easily estimate (extrapolating from letters typed by that machine ) 208-209mm.  I wonder if it was an European thing or just Olivetti, but I measured my Hermes 2000 in the past and iirc it was not even 203mm, it was even  less than that.
Now I wonder if my old H2K is a 12 cpi machine...

Hi Pete,  wonderful parade of nice European machines.  The Hermes adding machine is super nice.
I took a measure for 80 characters in my "10 cpi" Olivetti 32, and it adds up exactly at 208 mm too. So it appears Olivettis truly are not 10 cpi but more like 10cp(26mm). At least those I checked until now. I also re-checked my Hermes 2000 and that typeface (pica ?) is truly  pitch 10:   80 characters sum at 203 mm to the best of my eyesight.   Many thanks for checking on  your elegant Underwood.