Looks like paint chips to me. Sometimes serial numbers were not very deep, and were shallow. When rust and paint chipping comes, it looks like the serial has worn away, but it hasnt.

Now that's an interesting comment. I don't have much to compare to, but on this Underwood 5...


...the serial number is much neater. I would have assumed all serial numbers were stamped by hand.

This may shed some light on why the "y" on the Royal is noticably raised about the line - simply poor quality control, in line with the serial number.

I have noticed, Royal 10s almost ALWAYS have a prolem with the typebars.

I cannot believe that the machine would have left the Royal factory with the raised letter 'Y'.  Having looked at the close-up photo, it doesn't look as if the typeface (slug) has come off and been incompetently soldered back into place.  The soldering appears to match the adjacent typebars, so is almost certainly a factory job.  So what has happened ?  I think that a typebar broke or the typeface came off and got lost - maybe 30 years ago when the machine would have been considered as a valueless old nail.  As a quick and cheap fix, a typewriter mechanic swopped the whole typebar from a similar 'parts' machine without re-soldering the typeface to match the others.   Remember that back then, the machine wasn't worth repairing properly because it would cost more than it was worth.

Repartee wrote:

To the eye it looked like several digits of this serial number had been deliberately ground out..

A seven digit serial number is normal for a Royal 10, so your theory about several digits having been ground off the machine is without basis.

Repartee wrote:

This may shed some light on why the "y" on the Royal is noticably raised about the line - simply poor quality control, in line with the serial number

Citing a raised 'Y' and an uneven serial number as examples of poor quality control is nonsensical. It’s not like you just brought that Royal 10 home from the neighbourhood Royal Store to discover that your brand new typewriter had misaligned type. We’re talking about a mechanical machine that has had 80+ years of use and undoubtedly managed to survive many attempted repairs by its ham-fisted owners. It’s unrealistic to expect that your Royal 10 in its current condition is representative of how the machine performed or its type was aligned when it was new. The type alignment of a new machine was work that was performed by hand, and it was heavily scrutinized process. Along with the typewriter’s final inspection (which verified the type alignment and may have also involved tweaking it if necessary) took close to four hours to complete on the Royal assembly line. In other words, there no way that a Royal standard would have left the factory with such a glaring alignment issue. There are numerous things that can cause a type alignment issue, all of them realities of day-to-day use that can damage any typewriter - regardless of its manufacturer. Given the relatively high cost of such a machine when it was new, and fierce competition between the manufacturers for customers, none of the major brands could afford to release a machine that could be accused of having poor quality control.

Repartee wrote:

if you look at the shape of the typebar, it would be easy to bend side-to-side but almost impossible to bend up and down without buckling the bar: there is no way to raise or lower letters.

That's simply not true. Professional type alignment involves the use of specialty tools - I've read that as many as 20 different types existed - that can effectively lengthen or shorten a typebar to correct letters that are high or low. I'd suggest reading up on type alignment techniques.