A Galaxie-Sized Deluxe Typewriter Repair

Of course, I didn't go into the gory details of all the other fiddly things I did for this repair, like the ribbon take up was wonky, necessitating the lefthand spool drive sprocket needing to the adjusted. Or that the Power-Space feature, that interacts with the escapement, is sensitive to misadjustment and can wonkify the carriage movement at a moment's notice unless carefully attended to. Or that one of my other theories for the poor printing was the platen pivot point was too far back in the carriage bracket, which drove me down the deadend road of attempting disassembly of the lefthand carriage mechanism, which took hours and some muttering under my breath to recover from.



In the course of this adventure I took many reference photos with my phone, including this one (above) of the escapement mechanism. There are at least three springs that need to be released, and the entire Power-Space mechanism removed, before the escapement can, well, escape; which, even then, is a tedious job of 3D maneuvering around other bits and bobs. But being as this isn't the first Smith-Corona escapement I've worked on, I can say that I've become rather adept at cleaning and adjustment. The two dog levers need their pivot holes and pins absolutely spotless, along with the shoulders of the tiny shoulder screws. The screws and nuts holding down the levers need to be secured with absolute precision such that the nuts are tight but the levers pivot freely without up/down wobble motion. Since I had the escapement out, I replaced the small rubber pad that serves as the return silencer (i.e. keeps the escapement from making a grinding noise when returning the carriage to home). I made a replacement pad from a sheet of 1/64 inch thick synthetic rubber I'd acquired some years ago in a failed attempt at using it as a makeshift backing sheet for extra-hard platens.

This machine sports a nifty blue rubber platen roller in its narrower 9 inch carriage; narrower in the sense that the more common varieties of Galaxies are the model Twelve, which features - you guessed it - a 12 inch wide platen.

Another difference between this "Deluxe" and the "Twelve" is this one has a padded carriage return lever:



You may have noticed in the top photo that this machine had two TAB SET buttons! I've seen this before on some other machines, and it remains a mystery. Perhaps a series of these were release that way from the factory? Maybe disgruntled workers? Poor quality control? (Or quality assurance, depending on your philosophy about industrial process control?) Who knows. But I went and applied a CLEAR sticker to the TAB CLEAR button. What's your guess on which is which, drop a comment below.