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  1. Nice article about your Brother, I read about it’s travel tribulations and I can only commisserate with you having experienced almost exactly the same thing , only with a Hammond!.
    You guessed correctly regarding that centrifugal clutch, it function is to slow the carriage down whilst tabbing. I have been a seller of Brother in the past from my little business in Melbourne and I have been to the Brother factory in Japan. But I cannot recall seeing such a model like that one, it seems very well made with features that you would expect from more expensive brands. That push-button ribbon selector reminds me of the SCM office electric, it was the SCM 400c, what a machine and what a heavy weight!…best regards, John

    1. oh, no! A Hammond? I would cry. A lot. ):

      The Davis brothers, in ETCetera #100, indicate that the JP-3 was designed to share the carriage assembly of the JP-2 Electric. I sort of wonder if the centrifugal clutch was *needed* on the JP-2 because of the power return, and simply retained on the JP-3 for parts compatibility. It seems like an awfully robust and expensive feature to have on a manual portable if you’re trying to build one for the notoriously penny-pinching Montgomery Ward chain of stores. Now I kind of wish I had a JP-2 to examine. :D

      1. I seem to remember that about that time Remington marketed a compact electric that looked suspiciously like your portable. All I remember that it had a blue keyboard and was quite heavy for it’s size. It was very well made in contrast to the quality of Remingtons of that period.
        Perhaps it was the JP-2 under another name. Can any one show some light on this subject. It was your excellant photos of the carriage sub- assembly plus the centrifugal clutch that triggered my memory..it is all very interesting. I am grdually working my way through my collection and I might just have one of those electrics.
        However, by the time I find it we may have moved on, but I will let you know if I make such a discovery….Cheers, John

        1. I would guess that would be the Sperry Remington 700, according to the Davis brothers in ETCetera #100, that’s the brand that the JP-2 was sold primarily as.

          Neat! if you do find one, take some pictures of the internals. That would be an interesting comparison. Supposedly they sold very few of them.

          1. Yep, that is the model number, it is all coming back, the old grey cells get activated!. I saw and repaired quite a number in Melbourne so Remington would have sold more than a few. This was at a time when the Remington brand was in decline but they still had some pulling power with the general public. At one period Remington had 75% of the Aussie market and the rest was divided up betweem Underwood, Royal, Imperial and SCM with other smaller brands holding minute shares of the pie. It was not until the 60’s when Adler, Olympia and Olivetti came into the scene and the clear difference in quality became so obvious that Remington started to decline. Coupled with the US manufactures looking for a cheaper labour market that the influence of the Japanese manufacturers like Brother and Nakajima grew. It was cheaper for Remington to look outside the US for other brands to re-label as their own. IBM went to Mexico and Brazil, Royal went Dutch, SCM went I don’t know where but it was awful.
            Sorry, I did not mean to give a history lecture but now that you have stirred my curiosity I will search high and low to see if I indeed have one of those electrics and will most certainly keep you informed Cheers, John

          2. Hey, nothin’ I like better than a history lesson from someone who lived it (:

  2. Nice typewriter. Good work.
    Thank you for the nice review of Brother typewriter. I always looked down at the Japanese machines because the ones I used always seemed to be cheaper in feel and construction than other machines. Since I started collecting I have read qbout their good quality and since then I have had one or 2 on my wish list. I’ve always wanted one with a paper injector since I have never seen one except on one or 2 full size office machines.

    Having owned only one Nakijima and one Brother typewriter I found the quality of the Brother much better than the Nakajima machine.

    1. Hmmn, I haven’t run across any Nakajima machines yet, except at type-ins with “Royal” badges on them. They seemed nice but I haven’t had a chance to compare a Nakajima and Brother side-by-side. I think that would be interesting to do.

  3. Hey, good work! And this really does look like an interesting and well-made portable. Hope you can nurse it back to full health.

  4. Impressive- both the machine and your repair work. I probably would have written it off.

    Thanks for detailing the construction. The clutch mechanism looks like a more substantial version of the centrifugal governor that theoretically slows the carriage return on the IBM C.

    1. Yeah, in reply above I speculate that this feature might be an artifact of the Electric JP-2 machine that this JP-3 supposedly shares carriage assembly parts with. I was pretty sure I’d only ever seen this style of clutch on electric machines before this.

  5. This is good news, especially after seeing those horrible photos. Happy to know that you got it to work. And I couldn’t think of a more appropriate name for it than “Lazarus!”

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