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Saturday 14 December 2019

Keeping Your Typewriter Young (Popular Mechanics, November 1942)

All you need is some cigarette paper and a pipe stem cleaner!

2 comments:

Bill M said...

Some good advice. I even had that copy and do not recall the article.
Good pipe step cleaners are getting difficult to find as are cigarette papers.

John Cooper said...

Cigarette papers? Hard to find? Obviously, Bill, you don't frequent the head shops. :)

I agree that pipe stem cleaners aren't as ubiquitous as they used to be, but like most other hard-to-find items, they're easy to find on Amazon. Most cities have at least one cigar store for smoking enthusiasts, and I'd be surprised if they didn't carry them too. Personally, despite the undesirable cotton lint, I make do with cotton swabs.

I confess this article is the first mention I've heard of the problem of platen shells slipping around their cores. Given that all typewriters are now old typewriters, I would have expected to have encountered this if it were a common thing. It's hard to imagine how hammering a brad into a platen while it's still installed on the typewriter, as shown in the first illustration, could be done without permanently damaging the typewriter's adjustment.