Dug out my old Sears electric typewriter, didn't work

Back in the day, LOL, these were used by people to write school papers, fill out ‘carbon copies’ and lots of other things for communications. I’d purchased this in the early to mid 1980’s and moved it to every address I’d had there after.

I thought it would be fun to show my daughter what it used to be like before word processors and then computers. But it didn’t work. So, while I have lots of other things on my plate today, I had to get this working. What’s that blob of rubber and string spinning on the motor shaft. Yup, that used to be a rubber drive belt.

Cleaning that rubber mess took a good hour but I was able to clean it up. And lucky me, I save EVERYTHING and had an old bag of O-rings and found one which fit. The Power Return is a bit slow and the ribbon a bit old but it’s working enough to demo and then put back in its case for another 20 years. Wait, the 80s were HOW long ago? Time for a nap. LOL

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I have my mother’s old Remington manual typewriter that I used in school. It sits out for a display piece now.

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Nice! Those are works of art.

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If the old o-ring fails, apparently printing new belts with TPU is a thing. :open_mouth:

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When looking for info on these belts I ran across a few videos where the repair technician talked about scrapping the typewriter because belts were unavailable and other models without belts were readily available. So, I may have to try that since the o-ring likely slips a bit being round instead of wide enough to interface with the sides of the drive wheels.

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Man, that brings back some memories. I think I had some kind of model made by Brother maybe?

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Mark Presling mentioned arbitrary-length belts made from urethane a few weeks ago in his 4 facet grinder project:

Here’s something kind of like that:

3-4mm solid:

5-10mm hollow:

These don’t have mechanical joints, so they have to be heated up and joined. There are jigs available, but I think it can reasonably be done by hand, too.

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