“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a pangram which uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet and is commonly employed to test the functionality of keyboards. While everything is still lowercase because the shift key has unresolved gremlins, just getting to this point is a big milestone that reflects 3 weeks of learning and grit. And hey – who needs uppercase in the era of all lowercase text messaging. Unless, that is, you need to SCREAM. Which here I do, in frustration…
UGGHHHH After fixing the escapement and mainspring I thought the hard work was over. I ordered a set of new ribbons from Amazon and upon receipt and unpackaging was ready to start typing. This was not to be the case. My dreams of easy typing were dashed on the boulders first of LC Smith’s proprietary metal ribbon spools and second on a frozen ribbon spool shaft gear on the right side.
Not to be deterred, I rewrapped the new ribbon on the old metal spools (a process called respooling – latex gloves highly recommended) then applied a liberal amount of penetrating oil on the seized spool and worked it free with needle nose pliers.
Now all I need to do is fix the shift key, but that is going to have to wait until I can examine a similar functional typewriter to diagnose why mine is malfunctioning. That brings us to the conclusion of this side quest for now and a return to working on the restoration of the 1972 CB500.