This machine is a special one. It was bought by a fellow collector here in the Netherlands. It has all the original paperwork, and has the rare and desirable Fraktur typeface!
I sunk about 19 hours into this project, but it is very much worth the effort.
Here are the 'before' photos. As you can see, the machine was in good shape when it got here, but it needed quite a bit of work to get it looking great.
The platen shaft was frozen in place, so I had to dismantle the carriage to get the platen out. We kept the original platen because the machine came with an invoice for the platen that was on it. I sent off the platen out of a parts machine for resurfacing, but needed to make sure that it would fit this machine first. As it turned out, it was a little different than the 1915 platen, but I was able to make it work by swapping some of the hardware.
When the platen returned a few weeks later, I got started with the project. First up was the top part of the machine. I pretty much disassembled the whole thing, so I could clean every part as good as possible.
Next up was the bottom half of the machine. Just a bunch of polishing and cleaning of the mechanism. I did not take this apart as far as the top half of the machine because most of the mechanics are not as visible as on the carriage.
After this I reassembled the bottom half, and put the carriage back on. The last step was to make sure that everything worked as it should. So a bunch of testing, and aligning of different parts.
The case was in good shape to begin with, but the brightwork definitely needed a polish. Luckily Brasso works very well on these parts!
Here is the end result. I'm very happy with how it turned out!
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