A Tale of Two Brother Typewriters

There was I preparing to write a post in praise of Japanese-made typewriters. Then up turns a man who is opting out of this mad, mad, mad world and heading off to an overgrown paddock in Fiji. So he needs his typewriter put in working order. No computers where he's going. He found the Brother in an op-shop some years ago, all of $35 worth, and has never been able to use it.

I’m not surprised. It’s a beaten-up JP-3, second variant, serial number D8925202, more familiar as a Montgomery Ward Signature 510D. The D stands for Dire. This is the worst typewriter I’ve ever worked on. Worse than the mind-blowingly crappy Chinese-made Olivetti MS 25 Premier puss, or the almost equally inferior Brazilian-made Olivetti Lettera 82.
Is it possible the Japanese made a typewriter this bad? Apparently so. I also happened to have on the workbench an Akio Kondo-designed JP-1. A reliable, highly functional machine, the original flagship of the Brother fleet. Can you believe this? The JP-1 has 13 screws holding together the full mask, the JP-3 has 37!!! What the … ? Badly designed, over engineered, just a complete mess.
It’s working now, just. The carriage ball bearings had “frozen” with corrosion, the alignment was all over the shop, the touch control switch impacted on the ribbon movement. The saga went on and on. So glad it’s gone now.