Saturday, July 12, 2014

Facit TP2 Final Adjustment and Substitute Feet

The first few lines show the stacking. The last 7 the repair.




This mechanism locks the keys at the end of a line.

The odd shaped screw was originally parallel with the silver lever.

Replacement vinyl foot example. 

The feet extend just enough to grip really good.

The small semi-circular spring assists the auto-reverse.

The spring is missing from the right spindle.

Anyone have a parts machine with a card guide on it that matches this one?  It is bent and I'd like to find a replacement.  It works, but I am afraid much more bending will break it.  It is rather fragile. I could use a tiny spring for the right spindle auto-reverse too.
Overall the TP1 and TP2 are rather easy to work on as all parts are easily accessible. 

Housing is easily removed as well as the carriage and carriage cover, platen, and feed roller.

The carriage comes off easily by removing the small spring that protrudes through the hole in the bottom cover and 4 mounting screws, 2 at each end of the rails.

Escapement is easyly removed with 4 screws. The main spring is held by 2 screws.

Text alignment can be a bit tricky as the adjuster locking nuts can be tricky to tighten. 

Margin alignmnet and tab alignment as well as carriage feed adjustments are rather easy.  Sets are easy to work on , difficult to accurately set.

Even the spindles are somewhat easy to remove.  The tiny spring is very brittle, but with care they do not need to be disturbed.  There is a good reason the spindles are not a big problem to completely take apart -- the cement that Facit used as grease.
I have a TP1 and TP2 and I completly redid all 4 spindles because the poor quality grease turned to cement.

Overall nice typewriters to work on, but typical of the quality of many machines of the 60s and better than most of the 70s.

I find the TP1 and TP2 quite nice typers with the backspace and margin release intuitively located with the right hand shift key.

Worst thing about these machines is the completly stupid margin sets.  I think the engineer that designed them and the manager that approved them and put them into production were both drunk as a skunk or complete idiots.  I'll take a Hermes 3000 system over these pieces of crap any day.  Facit ruined very good machines with completely idiotic margin sets.