17 Jun
2005
17 Jun
'05
5:18 p.m.
Serondly, do
not spray it with Wanton Destruction 40, or anything else
for that matter. You will do a lot more harm than good...
I've been using sewing machine oil so far (which is the lightest stuff I've got). I just wonder if leaving it in a
(slowly circulating /
filtered?) bath of oil for a week or so would be useful for freeing
stuff up and getting all the dirt out...
No!. That is a sure way to get oil where you don't want it (like between
parts that are designed to slide over each other), and gum things up.
There is a bodger's trick of putting the whole machine (minus keytops,
rubber parts, and if possible the motor) in a solvent bath to clean out
the old lubricant and dirt, and then re-lubricating everything with a
suitable oiler tool. Everything meaning bearings, etc.
SOmewhaere I have a copy of a service manual for a hand-cranked
mechanical calculator (I think a friend found it on a web site). It makes
it _very_ clear that this is not the right thing to do, and that you
should take it all apart, clean each part separately and put it back
together again. Of course it's a lot easier to do that if you have the
service manual...
Most of the
time, that's due to tracking across the impregnated fibre
insulators used in things like the automatic on/off swtich.
Aha, well I can isolate and test easy enough there without any severe
dismantling of things. Can anything be done to fix the problem (short of
making new insulators)?