Monica and Stephen are local collectors who have many typewriters that are just my type, my personal kink being dysfunctional machines that need a lot of work.

One of those badly behaved typewriters is a BEE-u-tiful 1945 Smith-Corona Silent with a gorgeous black satin finish, glossy stripes, and all the curves.

Unfortunately, this machine had the Smith-Corona Clevis Blues: detached clevis connectors to the typebars. Monica’s typewriter had eight dead keys.

The clevis is a springy fastener that you see on L.C. Smiths, Coronas, Smith-Coronas, and SCMs.  I recently worked on a 1980s Coronamatic with mangled clevises, and by that time the company had been using clevis fasteners for 70+ years. Some years ago, I fixed a 1912 L.C. Smith No. 5 that had a detached clevis.

The detached clevis caused the backspace to fail.

Slightly off-topic: ever wonder what the Smith Bros looked like? Wonder no more. Here are Lyman, Wilbert, Hurlbut (!), and Monroe.

Anyhoo, the company (in its various incarnations) used the clevis technology (for better or for worse) for a gazillion years. It’s a common point of failure because under stress, the springy fastener will detach.

Fortunately, there’s a fiddly solution to this:

 

As you can see, it’s a very slow, awkward, and annoying process to re-attach. On Monica’s S-C Silent, eight keys had detached springed clevis connectors. What I found was that for the keys on the outside of the segment (e.g. “Q/q”), the best approach was through the top of the machine.

For keys in the middle of the segment, the bottom approach was best.

Most of the clevis fasteners were very bent, so I had to straighten them out before re-attachment. I then used a small narrow screwdriver to spread the springy tines of the clevis fastener, isolated the typebar I was working on so that I had some space, and popped the clevis back into the typebar hole. Some typebars took 2 minutes, and some took 20 minutes. I had to take several sweaty, shaking breaks before they were all re-attached.

I re-attached a dangling spring (thank you, captive spring hook), and I put a ribbon in for testing, discovering that I had a new problem: smearing and shading from the ribbon while I typed.

Ugh. I hate ribbon issues.

The shading and smearing are usually due to an incorrectly installed ribbon that’s bunching up and sagging into the paper, smearing ink. I checked. Nope, the ribbon was correctly installed. I went to the Facebook Antique Typewriter Maintenance Group and did some research.

Besides incorrectly installed ribbons, a commenter in the post suggested another source of the problem: poorly fitting spools.

Hmm. The spools on Monica’s S-C Silent seemed a tad tight on the spool spindles. I swapped out the old spools for some cheapo plastic spools that were looser on the spindle.

The cheap, loose spools fixed the problem. Hooray. Problem solved.

Dang. How sweet it is. It’s the little things in life that provide pure joy.