These Optima typewriters are part of a customer collection. Bought off the internet, the green guy arrived with multiple shipping damage problems. It was skipping badly, carriage would RUN, tabs interfered, margins would not adjust and the paint got a bit banged up. The customer got my estimate for the repair work, and since he wanted to have the machine professionally repainted, I put him in the work queue when it was ready from the paint shop.
When he brought the machine in for the repairs the paint was a prefect match. Boy is this Optima pretty!
The yellow Optima is missing the logo on the ribbon cover. We had a nice discussion of how to make a mold to duplicate the one from the other machine. Sounds like a fun project!
The machine had a cracked plastic platen knob on the left making it difficult to remove (these usually just spin off). My customer likes working on his own machines yet I could see why he brought this one into the shop. We are lucky to have many specialty tools and this one needed a super thin curved open ended wrench to reach the platen knob shaft. Since I had the knob off, my customer agreed to have me epoxy it back on the shaft.
The margins were also not moving so I cleaned off the contraptions and got them working again. Funny what solvents, and then a little oil will do for you.