Rubber Grommet Repair on Remington Super-Riters and Standards

As rubber replacement is one of the necessary and sometimes more finnicky parts of typewriter restoration, I thought it would be useful to write up the details of a small recent repair for others as well as my future self.

Late last May, I did a full clean, oil, and adjust (COA) on my 1951 Remington Super-Riter. One of the few restorations steps I didn’t carry out at the time was the replacement of the rubber grommets on the two side panels and the rear panel. The rubber was so hard and brittle on most of them that they crumbled off leaving only the brass inserts. Some of them also left a sludgy black residue on the metal.

This weekend, I went foraging at the local Ace Hardware store to find some replacements for the originals.

I took a reasonable guess and for 27 cents each I picked up six grommets which were the perfect size. If you’re in the market for your own replacement rubber grommets, they were Hillman part number 55051-A with the following specifications: ID: 1/8″; OD: 11/32″; Thickness: 3/16″; Grove Diameter: 1/4″; Groove width: 1/16″ .

When I went to install them, I discovered that I was able to wiggle them into the holes in the side panels. I could also get the brass grommets back in with a bit of work. However, I couldn’t discern for the life of me why they included the brass grommets from an engineering perspective. Leaving them off seems to allow a nice friction fit of the panels on the appropriate metal pins against the rubber. Further, without the brass grommets one seems to get not only a better fit, but the vibration dampening of the panels seems to work better. I also suspect the grommet life of the rubber will be better this way in the long run.

I notice that my later 1956 Remington Standard has a similar design for the side and rear panels, but in that case they’d switched to a single center pin and put two bare rubber grommets on each side of it, choosing to leave off the brass internal eyelets by this time—apparently they came to the same conclusion I had. This means that this same rubber grommet repair can be done on a variety of Remington standard typewriters made after World War II.

Editor’s Note: If you’re cleaning or repairing your own Remington Standard from this era, be sure to check and see if it’s got the Fold-A-Matic feature for making your job much easier. 

If for historical or consistency reasons, you insist on the brass gromets as part of the repair of your personal machine, you can certainly manage to use the originals with some care, however, if you’ve got your own eyelet tool (which many typewriter repair people may have for inserting eyelets into ribbon for the auto-reverse functionality of Smith-Corona typewriters) you can use it in combination with new 3/16″ (or slightly smaller) metal eyelets to more permanently seat your rubber grommets into your metal panels.

Have you tried this restoration trick before? What did you use for replacements?