This Remington Standard 10 typewriter is a customers machine from 1911, serial 175224. The machine was a recent purchase and had the typical tobacco residue and had been repainted a few times. Not your professional paint job; just a user or three brushing on a few black strokes to cover wear.
This big old guy needed much love and attention to get it running again. The list; a heavy and detailed cleaning due to all those tobacco resins, dust and old oils, new feet (one missing), tab links under the machine bent to crap or missing, ribbon feed frozen, rotten key tops, type bar rest flaking off, margin stops frozen in place. You know, the typical.
Since the tab assembly under the machine was in flopping all over the place I started there. I wound up needing to remove the entire assembly as after inspection the geared mechanism was broken along with the missing actuator arms. Fortunately, I’ve got a small pile of the older Remington machines so found the actuator arms and gear.
After that, the old hard feet come off and the cleaning commences. So much tobacco crap. It is somewhat satisfying when the cleaning solvent runs brown and much yuck. I even had to resort to household ammonia and then lacquer thinner on the bright work to get all that dedicated smoker crap off the machine.
Surprisingly, the platen and rollers, once cleaned are all right. After cleaning I installed new feet. I’m grateful T.T.S. Business Products from Garden City New York make the perfect match. I don’t have any more of the foot hook parts Remington loved to use on the older machines so a square nut and bolt worked just fine on replacing the missing foot.
I replaced the type bar rest with new cork and took key tops from a parted out Standard 10 machine to replace the bad e, r, t, i, c and n key tops. Once everything was together both the upper and lower case needed adjusting. New ribbon and this machine types again!