Here's my Royal Portable, (serial number: P1 43952).

Like my Remington (posted in another thread), this one also has an alligator paint finish, though this time in blue.

She’s pretty grubby and seems to be covered in 80 years of dirt and nicotine staining. If you look at the third picture down, you'll see a cleaned patch of paintwork showing the true colour. The fourth photo shows one of the type shields (name?) that’s been detached and cleaned up.

The last image is a close-up of the front-left of the machine and shows some significant wear to the paintwork. I can't figure out how this paint could have been worn away in regular use; it's nowhere that the lid of the case might rub against when you pack and un-pack it.

This wear is interesting in that you can see the different layers covering the metal. The base layer seems to be thick white primer. This is overlain by black (the standard finish?). We then have the blue layer, then the black alligator patches stenciled on in black.

I wonder how the stenciling was applied? In some areas the pattern is very dense; in others it looks stretched out. It's almost as if the design was printed on some sort of fabric base that was then stretched over the body of the typewriter.

I had been using meths to strip off the grime. It worked really well, but I noticed that some of the areas of blue paint seemed to be lightening where I was scrubbing hard. This seems ridiculous as the colour underlying the blue is black, and there was no trace of blue pigment on the cotton wool. However, I’ve played it safe since then and just used soap and water.

I’ve had a brief work-over of some of the exposed metalwork, but nothing significant yet.

I need to find some period spools for it. I had thought the original spool covers had been lost, but all the pictures I’ve been able to find of the same model show the spools exposed.

You can see one on Typewriter Heaven in wood-effect finish.

http://typewriterheaven.blogspot.co.uk/p/royal.html