I have been experimenting with Vine typewriter videos. Vine is a short-form video sharing service similar to YouTube, but the videos are a maximum of six seconds long. It’s a great format for me since I tend to be long-winded and it compels me To. Cut. To. The. Chase.
I described my Vine clips to my son as sort of boring. He reassured me, saying that if they are boring, then it’s only six seconds of boring. So here is a loop of six seconds of typing ala Oliver:
I can’t tell you how much pleasure I get from typing on that rattly old thing.
A couple months ago, my Oliver arrived in a damaged box that had been sealed with a kiss from the eBay seller and not much else. The typebar towers were mashed so much so that the top 3-4 typebars couldn’t move – they were all tangled together and rubbing each other especially on the right. The pencil holder was crumpled down.
Blug.
So I straightened things out. The typed text in the “before” shot shows the ransom note typed peculiarity of the bent typebars:
The “After” text is not quite straight, but I like the residual wackiness. It’s a 94 year old typewriter with its own personality, dammit.
The nickel plate on the tower guards and pencil holder was in bad shape – more rust than nickel plate on the back, so I threw them into an Evapo-Rust bath.
They came out very clean – a lot of bare metal but better than rust:
I bent the tower guards with padded pliers and worked on the typebars themselves with my bare hands. The typebars are very soft and with very gentle force + trial and error, I was able to disentangle them and straighten out the text. I took it very slow and made small, incremental changes. Though I live next door to the Metal Master Good Neighbor Brian, I would really kick myself if I broke any of these old typebars.
Long story short: I can now type a fairly respectable letter.
Lastly, here’s a bonus Vine video clip. In six seconds or less, I remove the carriage from my Oliver No. 9:
myoldtypewriter 
Nice Vines! And I am a big believer in Evapo-Rust.
If abused, an Oliver can develop incredibly bad alignment.
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Evapo-Rust is great! I first came across it in your Sholes Visible restoration posts and I thought to myself, “I’ve got to get some of that.”
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A wonderful transformation!
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Though finally working, this Oliver is still a work in progress. She still has a very dirty, very rusty carriage I’d love to take apart and clean (if I can get the rusty little screws off)
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All you’ve got to do now is throw a pencil in the holder, and you’ll have brought this Oliver full circle!
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Consider it done, sir. I’ll hunt down a pencil.
This is such a fun machine. Thank you again for your help in getting it moving again. Now that I have one working, I am on the lookout for another another cheap, broken-down Oliver.
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gets addicting, don’t it? 😀
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Do you mean typewriter collecting or making Vine clips?
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me puede enviar las plantillas con las formas de la oliver tengo una pero las tipos estan torcidas. horaleo148@gmail.com.
gracias
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Los tipos de Oliver están frecuentemente torcidos porque están muy expuestos. Doblo un poco la barra de tipos con mucho cuidado. Entonces pruebo la impresion. Doblo un poco más y vuelvo a probar. No tengo plantilla
Dime si quieres fotos de un Oliver 9 con tipos en buena alineación. Tengo uno que está en buenas condiciones.
Por favor disculpe mi muy mal español.
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