We don’t see too many Woodstock typewriters in the shop. Mostly they are not that great of writing machine so few survived. On the other hand, they are totally cool typewriters! I see many similarities between other brands in the Woodstock, and it is too bad their competitors won over the public. This grand beast came in for a cleaning, oiling, ribbon feed problems and general tune up. After the mundane task of cleaning, of which I found a cute plastic toy stuck in the bottom key levers (at least I found out why the Q and A were sticking!), it was on to making this wonderful piece of history a working model.
The typewriter was not typing with any consistency. The outer keys would activate the escapement very late and the middle too soon. There were some obvious missing springs and bent items that I put back to spec easily, but the inconsistent key action would drive any writer crazy. I had to ask Mr. Montgomery for a little advice as this was my first Woodstock on the bench. After much pondering; mostly noting the defects of prior adjustments we got to some basic conclusions.
The typewriter had seen many adjustments to compensate for, get this…. the carriage was loose. This caused the type bars to hit the platen sporadically and the previous repair folks, instead of just adjusting the carriage, proceeded to adjust the escapement timing to compensate. They also wound up the draw band spring so tight the tension had been causing excessive wear on the margin rack.
So after a little back and forth between us guys on what to correct first, Mr. Montgomery won out: take care of the carriage and it will correct the type bar miss alignment which will make adjusting the escapement timing a breeze. Man, is that man right on!
I won’t bore you with more details, and once that carriage was tightened, it was quick work getting the other items done. Oh, it came to us with no ribbon spools, and we are lucky that we had new old stock on the shelf.
