21 May
2007
21 May
'07
6:59 p.m.
On May 19, 2007, at 4:13 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Good to know, thanks! I'm really *not* tempted to take it apart to
that degree. I think I would prefer to leave that to a professional
typewriter shop if necessary.
I'd love to hear from anyone else who has one, or who has worked on
I have one, and not suprisingly, I've also had it apart. They are
fairly
modular (although removing the complete typing unit chassis is a
lot of
work), you can remove the punch, reader, encolder and decoder very
easily.
A couple of things to watch for if you're taking it apart. Firslty,
you
need a set of Bristol Spline keys, the grubscrews have that type of
socket. Secodnly, the carrigage feed escapment has 4 rows of loose
ball
bearingsm of 2 sizes. If yoy're tempted to strip this, take great care
(or ask me...) Mine has separe shift up and shift down character
codes that move the
type basket, I think. I've used one that worked in ASCII and which did
the shifts automatically.
Mine seems to have "On 1" (left) and "On 2" (right) keys, as well as
an "Off" key next to the tabulator, which I assume generate the
"Upper Case" and "Lower Case" codes respectively. (These are not
power switches, of course -- those are located on the right side).
I haven't picked it up yet, so I don't know what character set the
upper case prints. Based on the photographs, I'm assuming it does
not print any custom computer characters seen on the PDP-1 or TX-0
flexowriters. I think the vast majority of flexowriters in the field
were used for generating paper spam, and would have had a normal
typewriter character set installed, correct?
-Seth