In an earlier post I mentioned a couple of problems that my Olivetti Letter 22 suffered. The main was that the bell did not ring as I typed toward the end of a line. Instead, the carriage would seem to get stuck before it reached the margin, and the only way to remedy the situation while typing was to physically give the carriage a nudge from the side. Needless to say, that was a bit annoying.
I had originally planned to bring up to the typewriter repair place up in Albuquerque, and I sent him some photos and a description of the problem, and he said what he thought it might be, and gave me a quote: $325! Ouch. Well, I can't afford that, and I am not that in love with the Lettera 22 to bite the bullet and do it on that account, so I figured I would keep at it and try to figure out what the cause of the problem might be.
Anyway, after lots of looking and trying to figure it out, I identified the cause of the problem.
The way things are supposed to work, the margin set (Pink arrow) hits the short arm of the bell hammer (yellow arrow), which causes the actual hammer to hit the bell (white arrow). Normally, the margin set hits the hammer and then continues past it. In the case of my machine, it was getting stuck on that margin set and thus not continuing on to the actual margin set point. I noticed that if I tilted the carriage forward a bit, the problem stopped. This suggested to me that the carriage must not be properly positioned. Maybe there is some sort of fine setting screw, I hoped. And so, I looked around and gave every screw that seemed like it might be an adjuster a twist, but all were tight. All tight except one, that is. Turned out that the screw going directing into the carriage from the side was lose, so I gave it a couple of twists until it seemed tight and gave the machine a try again to see if the bell problem was any different.
Well, as it turned out, the bell problem was different. It was gone. Now all functioned as it should, and all it took was the tightening of one, easy-to-reach, screw. Lucky me!
This leaves me with only one problem - the ribbon advance. This works fine when travelling from left spool to right, and it automatically switches to the other direction when it hits the end of the ribbon, BUT when it starts moving from right spool to left, the left spool will often stop turning. Sometimes it will start again by itself, and sometimes I have to give it a twist to get it moving again. At any rate, it seems to snag a a certain point in its rotation. It was worse before, actually, but I used some dental floss to see if there might be some dirt or such under there causing the problem, and there was something. Something that seemed at first like some brush bristles, and then like a long black hair, but then something finer like a silk thread. At any rate, I pulled out what I could, and that helped a lot, but the problem still exists to some extent. Enough to be a bit of a nuisance anyway.
And so the search for a fix continues. I will keep you advised on what happens.
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