The Wheelwriter from IBM is a great machine and took off from the Selectric. Then…. word processors took over. We were asked to take two dead Wheelwriter 2’s and make one a working typewriter. I love these jobs, as a customer has given me complete control over what to use from each machine. The one machine was clearly dead for a long time as it was clean, platen and feed rollers in great shape. The other typewriter was dirty as a Clint Eastwood Western and had a hard… hard life.
The Clint Eastwood machine would light up intermittently, so I started with it. First is always blowing out the dust bunnies, and this one was a dust storm! Next was testing the power supply and basic ribbon cable connections. The power supply needed to be removed to do some basic testing and it was in pretty good shape and got a chemical cleaning to make sure there were no intermittent stray voltage surges across capacitors. That alone cured the intermittent on/off, and now we are off to the races!
The paper feed was awful, never giving a nice straight feed so rather than spend the time refurbishing the platen and roller the dead machine gave up its beautiful rubber. Then it was a basic clean up of the type head mechanism, guide bars, testing of tabs, memory function, line space and walla! A perfectly good Wheelwriter from two.