Saturday, November 24, 2018

Aligning a Montgomery Ward (Brother) Signature 511


Not exactly the view in the thrift shop. this is the case sitting on my spare oscilloscope cart.

Keys included.  This is supposed to mean if I sell it on Ebay I can charge more because there are keys!

This is not the sample from the thrift shop.  I used the back of an ATM receipt that has since been run through my document shredder.


511 not D.  I thought the D had changeable type slugs.  This is not a D, but look at the red key in the upper row, right.





The 2 screws with lock nuts in the middle of the image and middle of basket are the alignment screws.  The upper screw is for the upper case and the lower screw for the lower case.

Here is a better view of the lower case screw. Gunk or is this locking material from Brother?  It was only on the lower nut and screws. It is very much like the conformal coating on U. S. Army  circuit boards and other items to weather proof it.  Same hardness too. I had to dig it off with a hefty (not X-Acto) razor knife.

Only tools required is a 6mm ignition wrench and small screwdriver.
The alignment screw for its associated case is unlocked and turned in small increments CW or CCW to align the bottom serif with the card guide line.  For Sanserif letters the bottom of the letter is aligned with the card guide mark.

Besides aligning the characters with the card guide line I like to use the fractions if the typewriter has them. 

An alternate way is to use the comma and period and the serifs at the bottoms of letters.


These 2 show how clean the type slugs on this machine are as found.  I did not need to clean  them.  Generally the e, a, o, p, g, d, m, and b need a good cleaning from having parts of tehm filled with caked in hard ink and dirt.

The red + = key indicates this typewriter has an interchangeable type slug.

...and here is the interchangeable slug.  SCM uses 2 on some of their typewriters.  I've only ever seen one on a Brother other than the rotating one.

One of teh few portables that is fully full-featured.  This typewriter even has a paper injector.

With a little help from Grey Goose.

This turned out to be my second Brother typewriter.  My Montgomery-Ward Accord 10 is the other.

This turned out to be a nice typing typewriter.  The touch is a bit firmer than some of my others, and 2 things I find that I do not like about this typewriter is that it is easy for me to run 2 characters together as seen in my typing.  The other being the paper injector only has one stop, at maximum.  I've gotten used to the one on my Hermes Ambassador that can be set any place up to 12 lines.  the Brother will take a bit of practice.

All of the imagery in this typecast is from my LG G5 in HDR mode.  None of the images have been edited.  I have been playing with using my cell phone during some of my typewriter adventures ever since I did the Lettera 32 post (also from the phone, but edited in GIMP) .  The phone is handy, and the images seem quite acceptable for blogging without the need to use one of my Olympus imagers at the work bench.