The Cougar’s taken some rough landings in it’s previous missions, and many of the plastic tabs that hold the shell halves together are broken..
both are broken on this side, so I had to improvise a tab – I used a very tiny drill bit to drill a hole in the remaining tab and hot-glued a little bit of paper clip in the hole. Hot glue alone won’t take the pressure, but the added metal backbone is enough to keep it secure and snug-fitting again.
These plastic 6Y’s don’t have any soundproofing at all in them, so I add some soundproofing felt to the insides of the shell.
the hot-glue paperclip trick worked!
Before I put ‘im back together, let’s take ‘im for a test-drive…
The case looks great. Don’t you just hate it when a nice job is finished only to find that the type is all over the place?
Looks like the letters at the left hand of the keyboard print too high. First of all i would check that the type guide is correctly centered and all the typebars hit it right in the middle of it without scratching on one of its teeth (even if they don’t get stuck, they still can be a little off- center, and that can cause problems). Also, there should be only a very little play of the typebar inside the guide.
If the letters are still off alignment, you can lower the letters by placing a very gentle C-shaped bend in the middle of the typebar, thus shortening it. Use letters at the centre of the keyboard as a reference for vertical alignment.
Good luck with the repair.
Davide
I have to say… I do like that colour. Shame that the metal used in the type bars on this beast were so soft and prone to distorting.
that can be a two-edged sword though. soft enough to go out of whack easily, and also soft enough to bend back into whack easily. For instance, this machine had a soft-to-non-existent left margin problem (in that it would easily pop right past the margin on return) very similar to my ’41 Royal. Had to take that Royal to MTE since it needed precision grinding, but on this machine, the margin stop is soft steel and bent right back into place easily. (:
This machine is carriage-shifted, right? My first suspicion is the carriage doesn’t detent property in the U/C or L/C positions. It looks like the platen is just bouncing up and down.
-Clark
You are right. I’m a week behind in blogging, but it turned out I’d put the platen back together wrong. Once I figured that out, it was fine. It’s all back together and typing fine now. (:
Awesome! Post some ‘after’ typing samples for future reference.
You da’ man!
Hello, I bought a Royal Quiet De Luxe a while back at an antique store. Lovely condition, perfect working order, came with portable case. I was finally able to locate its serial number (after giving up about a year ago), and I have done quite a bit of digging, especially on the Typewriter Database. Wherever I look, a serial number match does not show up. The number is A-1945639. Do you happen to have any information on it?
wow, you didn’t look very hard. It’s right there:
1473968 1948
1741468 1949
1940834 1950
2137681 1951
it’s a 1950. (:
Hey, new to this serial number gig. But thanks, anyways.