(Typewriter) Screw Loose

It’s coming up this month to the 91st anniversary of Jesse Owens’s remarkable achievement of establishing six world records on the one afternoon at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His long jump record of 26 feet 8¼ inches (8.13m) stood for a quarter of a century. Later, Bob Beamon soared through rarified air to 29 feet 2 inches (8.9m) at the Mexico City Olympic Games, a record which stood for 23 years. In the insect world, fleas can leap 13 inches (35cm), a feat second only to jumps made by the superfamily of froghoppers.

But no human, nor any flea, nor any froghopper, can jump astonishingly long distances and then simply disappear into thin air.
A tiny typewriter screw can …
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Way back - when, as I recall, Yahoo hosted the No 1 typewriter forum on the web - one of the pioneer American collector-restorers wrote an hilarious article about spending the best part of a year down on his knees searching for a missing Corona 3 screw on his workshop floor. (If memory serves, it was Ed Peters, but I can’t be certain about that.)
Being forewarned didn’t stop me – unhappily – from taking an armoury of screwdrivers to a multitude of unsuspecting typewriters. And, yes, over almost 30 years many dozens of tiny screws have been lost forever. One does often get a vague idea about the general direction the recalcitrant screw has taken in its flight, but more often as not the hunt in this area proves utterly fruitless. I’m sure this is a mystery experienced by all those who’ve failed to resist that inevitable temptation – “I’ll just loosen this one screw …”
There is, nonetheless, another side to these screwy sagas. And that is the barely controllable joy at actually finding a missing screw. Down on the workshop floor on all fours, straining the eyesight, looking fore and aft, when suddenly there’s the slightest glimmer of a slightly silvery screw. A stretch, a touch, and … yes, triumph! Except sometimes, as happened to me yesterday, same said found screw immediately went walkabout again. Damn! The hunt resumes …