Using the Fold-A-Matic feature of the Remington Standard to Clean, Oil, and Adjust

Today I spent a few hours cleaning, oiling, and adjusting my new (to me) Remington Standard typewriter.

Remington Fold-A-Matic

Fortunately, before I had started I was aware of a possibly little known feature called the Fold-A-Matic. I came across the idea of the Fold-A-Matic while looking at other Remington Standards and Super-Riters on the TypewriterDatabase. This led me to a photo of James Groom‘s typewriter and a post by Ted Munk which had a diagram from a Remington repair manual. The fun of the feature is that by loosening a few screws, removing a few others, the entirety of the back end of the typewriter including the carriage folds open allowing easy access to almost all the parts of the typewriter. This means it’s far easier to clean, oil, and adjust almost everything on the machine.

Typewriter manual page from a 1960s Remington 19 typewriter.

So instead of spending a day and a half cleaning out a typewriter, I managed to do it in about half a day.

Since I didn’t come across any great photos of the machine opened up, I thought I’d document some of that process along the way.

From the Remington Standard Typewriter Repair section of AMES Basic Training Manual for Standard Typewriters by Murray Harris (January, 1968)
To begin, one needs to loosen the screws that hold the top of the left and right body panels onto the typewriter. They can then be leaned out and quickly removed.

Next one removes the two screws (the rear ones labeled B in Monk’s diagram) on either side that hold the rear cover in place. It too pivots on a small piece of metal at the bottom so it can be easily lifted off and removed.

Next one can remove two screws in the carriage area (labeled A in Monk’s diagram), the other two “B” screws and the “C” screws on either side. Finally, one then loosens the two “D” screws at the back rear corners of the typewriters. It’s important that these should only be loosened a few turns as they’re used as a pivot to hold the rear of the typewriter in place. They could certainly be completely removed, but it takes some work to get everything aligned and back together again.

Now you can fold down the entirety of the rear of the typewriter, thereby opening it up for cleaning and adjustment. Of course, not everything is accessible in this configuration, but by removing the ribbon hood or flipping the machine over, the majority of the typewriter components are readily reached. This procedure takes just a minute compared to about 10-20 minutes of work to get other machines apart into a somewhat similar state. You save this time again on the other end when putting things back together. The other benefit is that so much of the machine can be easily reached and adjusted that less tweaking is required along the way. It cut my cleaning process roughly in half.

Missing/Broken Screws

One of the issues my particular model has is that the rear cover didn’t seem to have any means of holding it on. There were holes in the left and right side, but there didn’t appear to be any way for them to be used to hold the rear cover onto the machine. While cleaning, I discovered both of the screw heads (shoulder bolts, in fact) had been shorn off. Fortunately the screws were long enough that they exited the opposite side of their mounts, so I was able to easily remove them. I’ll have to find some replacement screws.

Historical Servicing

Given the age of the machine, the small chips and dings in the paint or the wear on some of the crinkle paint, it was reasonably well-used and likely cleaned and adjusted several times. It’s been a while since the last cleaning as some of the eraser bits inside the machine have stained some of the shiny steel. But I’ll note that the amount of oil used in the last service was very light at best. There were several patches of grease used on the mechanics on the sides as well as the axel of the mainspring and in the bearing assembly for the shift mechanism. I photographed these as evidence of how this model was serviced at some point in its prior life.

Additional points

After winding through some of the ribbon, I’ve found a usable patch. I’m curious to see if the dried out parts will absorb some moisture to be usable again. We’ll see what happens, otherwise, I’m sitting on a nice mountain of new ribbon to respool onto this machine.

After cleaning, I’m noticing that the speed of the machine has picked up a bit. I’ll give it a few days of use to see how things proceed, but I suspect that it could be faster. If it doesn’t improve, I may give it a few additional drops of oil in places, a process which dramatically helped out my Royal HH a week after cleaning it out. Pending this, I also ought to take a closer look at the touch control set up functionality.

The platen on this machine has a bit of play left, but not much. It’ll probably go another few years before it’s completely rock hard. At least I don’t need to have it recovered soon.

Cleaning and adjusting got rid of the residual grinding on the carriage I was experiencing a few days ago.

In the cleaning process, I noticed that one of the poor design choices is that the panels on the carriage don’t remove as easily as they do on other machines.

I notice on the paper fingers there are separately a small hole on the left for drawing straight lines using a pen or pencil and a small triangle on the right for similar usage.

As I’ve done on some past machines, I treated the crinkle paint with WD-40 after cleaning it off. The difference is quite dramatic, though even the before and after photos don’t really do the process justice.

As ever, there are still a handful of small issues with this machine that I hope to address in the coming weeks as I use it. I like it quite a lot, and it reminds me of it’s much smaller brother, a 1957 Remington Quiet-Riter, but with some finer features. I hope to pull it out and do a direct comparison in the next few days. We’ll see how it grows on me as a machine, but at the moment, I still like my Royal KMG and HH a bit better for day-to-day use.