My girlfriend owns an old typewriter which one day suddenly stopped working. The ribbon vibrator was not moving anymore which meant that the no ink got on the page. On top of that many keys were jammed and did not come back down after pressing them which greatly decreased the speed of typing. I have never repaired a typewriter before but I was happy to try to help.

The Issue

A typewriter works by slamming a metal key with an embossed letter (or raised letter) on a thin ribbon that contains ink. The raised part of the key will pass the ink from the ribbon to the page. The problem is that the ink ribbon has to sit over the area you’re typing. But when you are typing you don’t want to do it blindly so you can’t have a ribbon cover the word you are currently writing. For that reason you have a mechanism that raises the ribbon in place just before the key hits the page. The part which does this is called the ribbon vibrator.

To be able to move the ribbon up there is a small lever that is connected to the greater typing mechanism. When you press down on a key this lever gets pushed up and so does the vibrator. It was the lever that got disconnected from the ribbon vibrator which caused the issue.

The Repair

It took me some time to understand the inner workings of the typewriter (I still don’t fully understand it) before looking for the problem. When I figured out what the issue was, as stated before I tried finding a way to put the lever back in. I tried to wedge my finger in the small space but I did not manage to fix it in this angle, I had to take the whole slide off.

To get to that I had to remove the whole sliding bar which was pretty easy, a few screws, but to put it back was a nightmare. With the bar in my hands I tried to slide the lever in the small hole and at the same time I had to put the sliding bar back in place. When trying to put back the sliding bar the lever always fell out of the hold and after many unsuccessful attempts I gave up.

Second Attempt

A year later I tried to fix it again. This time I looked for some help on reddit again (last time my post wasn’t accepted). I got some stupid redditor comments, only two were kinda helpful (thanks reddit). Somebody had a similar model but I wasn’t able to find a repair manual, only the user manual. On top of that I couldn’t find any pictures of the interior of this typewriter. The closest I got was the Hermes 2000 which looks similar but is not exactly the same. But not even this model had any in-depth videos of the inner workings.

So I just opened it again, this time being able to remove a rod that was connected to the sliding bar.

It was quite dusty so I took out my used toothbrush which I use to clean everything with and removed much of the dust. Here’s a picture from the other side.

I don’t want to make this article longer than necessary, but there really isn’t much more to say than: I just tried slowly putting it back many times until it worked. First I tried without attaching the rod and then when it worked I tried again but this time with the rod.

Unjamming The Keys

The last issue left were the keys. Some of them were stuck or did not return back fast enough, some didn’t even come back at all. To fix this, again, the solution does not require too many steps

I put some houshold alcohol in a spray bottle and added some vodka. The typewriter would probably be fine with pure 95% alcohol but I still wanted to play safe and diluted it a bit. Vodka is my key ingredient when cleaning anything, be it laptops, cameras or now typewriters.

I watched this video for advice on how to clean them. It’s straightforward, just spray some alcohol on the keys and then individually move them up and down. The good thing about this typewriter is that there is just metal underneath the keys, and after that there is an opening. So all the excess alcohol will just fall down and then dry. Maybe you should be more careful with a newer model that has a plastic enclosure.

Fixing Things Is Nice

Seeing the typewriter work again was very cool. It’s a nice feeling to repair things, especially when they have sentimental value. But also just being able to make an object useful again is nice.

I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more in depth details of how to repair typewriters but what you can take away is that you should just try fixing something that does not work anymore. Of course don’t do anything that could risk breaking something sentimental but just try fixing things that broke. The worst that can happen is it breaking just a tiny bit more. (Also please research a bit beforehand, don’t play around with toxic chemicals or dangerous machines)

The text is faint because I need to buy a new ink ribbon.