Hello folks, this is my beautiful IBM Selectric II, not any Selectric, the Selectric with
the correcting button right here. Otherwise known as the Golfball typewriter. The original
Selectric I was unveiled in 1961, and it was a true revolution. It achieved like 80% market
penetration. The Selectric II is 1971, the Selectric II with correcting button is 1973.
It is entirely mechanical, there is no electronics in it at all. 2000 mechanical parts and a
million adjusments. The guy that invented this must have been
friend with the guy that invented the helicopter, it's a completely un-intuitive design that shouldn't
work, but it does, works very well. So, a little work on that one, the tab doesn't
work, the carriage return is sluggish, my beloved correcting button is not working,
and my head is a little bit out of alignment. So we'll take a peek inside and try to fix
it. Now taking this apart is a piece of cake if
you do it in the right order. First, you need to put the carriage in the middle. Then open
this up, this goes forward, this goes backward. Two thumbs on these levers. Don't forget to
take that piece out and also to flip those levers up. And inside, there are two levers,
push them forward. One, two. And if I didn't mess up that should do it. There is one more
lever inside here that you pull forward. That allows you to raise the machine, slide it
forward, flip it up, and voila, you are ready to work on your IBM Selectric.
So how does this magnificent beast work. It does print by controlling the spin and the
tilt of the ball. There are two bands here, one here, one there. And if I pull on them,
I can see the ball turning a bit here. And the other one does the tilt. Mine is cocked
to the side, so I have to figure out which arm moves this. And is attached to this guy
over here, and there is a turnbuckle. So it should be fairly easy to adjust.
By the way, this thing is of mind-boggling complexity. Here is a summary adjustment manual,
and these are all the adjustments that you can go through. And there are pages upon pages
upon pages of this thing. It's a 100 pages. That's just the concise form. And then you
look at the mechanism and it just keeps going and going. The guy that invented this was
completely crazy. So now I just have to work on my sticky tab
key, the return is not that good either, it sticks.
It's working again, that is fine. That was the toughest one to repair, the sluggish carriage
return. It turns out it's these guys over here that have to be adjusted properly first.
There should be no oil on that one, because it grabs the shaft that powers the carriage
return. Of course it was bathed with grease, so I cleaned it up. And this guy, you have
to adjust. That's the torque limiter, and you have to pull this tail here back a little
bit, to extend the spring and increase the force. I made real progress here, the whole thing
prints. And I can go back and erase things. My auto-correct works again.
It seems to work plenty fine.