typewriter restoration | Chris Aldrich

Acquisition: 1958 Olympia SM3 Portable Typewriter

The Purchase

On Saturday, August 3rd, after a patience-trying wait, I picked up this lovely green 1958 Olympia SM3. It’s the first typewriter in my collection with both an exotic character set as well as a typeface that veers outside of the standard pica and elite typefaces.

It was a Facebook Marketplace purchase for a better-than-reasonable price. I had made a middling offer to someone out in Rancho Cucamonga not knowing what sort of condition the machine was in. I should have headed out the next day to pick it up from the seller, but with our respective schedules and the 45+ minute drive out, I opted to suggest a Saturday pickup. In the erstwhile, someone sniped it away from me with a significantly larger offer. And of course a day later, they’re on r/typewriters asking about what the typewriter was not realizing that it included some math and Greek characters. I watched and waited and stayed in contact with the seller for more than two weeks. As it turned out the bigger offer never materialized, so the seller told me to come out and pick it up for my original offer.

The seller was in her early 30’s with a relatively young family. She’d inherited the machine from her parents or in-laws who used it, but had kept it in an attic in Newport Beach for the past few decades. Apparently the original owner was a pharmacist, which may account in part for the custom Greek letters on the keyboard. Despite the intermediate inheritor, this has broadly been a one owner machine.

I tried to not show any shock at the non-standard typeface when I picked it up for what is assuredly below market value. I could easily have seen this going for $180-200 as a standard SM3 in unknown condition, but somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-400 with the non-standard typeset and the Congress typeface.

Overall condition

The machine had seen some reasonable use followed by neglect. The first thing I noticed was the damaged paint job on the case, which I’ll go into detail on below.

The usual bushings problem in Olympia SM3s was definitely present, but fortunately the seller hadn’t spent much time testing or tinkering with it to damage the paint job. I quickly swapped the compressed bushings out the day I brought it home.

The ribbon was mostly dried out and worn, but potentially serviceable, though I’ve opted to replace it entirely. One of the spools was an original metal and the other was a plastic replacement.

In addition to a carriage lock that wasn’t engaging properly, there were some issues with five of the custom keycaps.

Beyond this, the machine was generally in good condition. Despite some reasonable use, the paint finish is in great shape and only shows light wear on the front corners and the front edge of the hood. It definitely needed a good cleaning, oiling, and adjusting.

Richard Polt has posted a manual for the Olympia SM3 for those who’d like to see what originally came with the machine as well as its features.

Clean, Oil, and Adjust

I started the process of disassembling and cleaning the machine on Saturday, August 31st. I spent a portion of the day on Sunday finishing the cleaning and reassembling and adjusting the machine. Oiling the necessary parts as I reassembled made it far easier to limit the amount of oil I used for future maintenance.

I took some photos as work proceeded for those interested in that portion of the process.

My notes from mid-July were tremendously helpful in speeding this process along.

One of the most bothersome issues I encountered while cleaning it was that it was put up “wet” and stored for too long. The original owner had the all-too-common bad habit of erasing directly into the typewriter rather than moving the carriage to the side. This means that it had a fair amount of eraser crumbs stuck to the over-oiled carriage rails and other internals. Over decades of storage, this has heavily tarnished the carriage rails and required not only aggressive cleaning on some parts, but several rounds of metal polish to remove some of the tarnish. There are still some light stains on the internal “brights” which I’ve given up on after half a dozen attempts to minimize them. They’re now in much better condition, but not as perfect as I wish they might be.

Keys

The keyboard on this Olympia is a fairly standard U.S. based QWERTY keyboard meant for sale in America through The Inter-Continental Trading Corporation which originally imported Olympias into the Americas.

Of particular note on this machine, some of the standard keys have been swapped out with some custom math and Greek letter keys. These are the )/0, !/3/4, 1/4, 1/2, ,/, ./. which have been replaced respectively by )/ϒ, Ω/π, λ/∫, Δ/, , μ/.

I’ve already accidentally typed an upsilon instead of a zero at least once. It may take some work at the muscle memory to remember to use the capital “O” to make it as reflexive as doing an apostrophe-backspace-period to effect an exclamation point which this machine lacks in lieu of other glyphs.

While most of the keys have the appearance of being doubleshot plastic, the custom keys seem to have been manufactured differently. Perhaps they were etched out and then filled? In any case, the symbols on the custom keys were etched out and missing most of their original color making it difficult, but not impossible to know what they were. To quickly and easily restore them, I spent a couple of minutes with a Crayola crayon and the small gaps on the keys were filled in and looking nice and white again. This solution also has the benefit of being easily reversible from a restoration perspective.

Other functionality

Manufactured at the peak of typewriter functionality, this SM3 has just about all the niceties one could wish for. Compared to typewriters made since mid-century there isn’t anything really extraordinary about any of the features aside from their incredibly well designed and manufactured tolerances.

It does bear mentioning that while most other machines of this era were segment shift machines, this one is a carriage shift which can make using it for very long periods a bit more tiring. There are two manually adjustable spring mechanisms inside the machine to help alleviate some of this effect.

Of interest, in comparing this machine with my other 1958 SM3 which has a lower serial number, I noticed that the older SM3 has an additional scale on the back near the tab stops, but this one doesn’t. It’s likely a reasonable cost savings to have removed it which also frees the assembly line from needing to do another alignment procedure on them. From a functionality standpoint, it’s not a big loss as I tend to set my tabs from the front of the machine and can easily look down on the scale at the back of the paper table and align the tab stops with that scale anyway. The additional scale on the back would only have been useful for those who turned their machines around and set them from the back, but this would also need the scale to have been appropriately aligned to provide the precision in setting the correct stops.

Case

This SM3 came with one of the traditional curved, space-aged wooden cases painted in silver that most SM3s shipped with. The inside was in relatively nice condition and only needed a quick vacuuming and some brushing to clean it out. It also came with the original key on a small keychain.

Apparently the environment it had been stored in was less than ideal, so the exterior paint has reacted and has a terribly rough texture now compared with its traditional smooth surface. I’m going to have to strip and repaint it I think. I’ve seen some hammered metal paint finishes which might come close to matching the original, but I might opt for something completely out of the ordinary as well.

The metal on the case fittings has rusted significantly. I should be able to clean up and polish most of the metal fittings fairly easily, though I probably won’t be able to get them back completely without replacing them altogether.

Based on the condition of the case’s feet, I’m guessing the owner used the typewriter inside the case for most of their work. I’m debating whether or not to replace the feet, but I’m leaning towards doing it because they’re in functional, but marginal condition.

My Last Typewriter?

I suppose if you were going to quit collecting Olympia SM3s after getting a particular machine, this would be pretty close to the perfect one. This shirt I got on the same day as the typewriter is obviously about Olympia SM3s, as who could ever quit collecting? or perhaps as Richard Polt is fond of saying, “investing”?

Full transparency, I’ve acquired five machines since I picked up this typewriter, but I’ve also washed that t-shirt 3 times since then. With the washings you almost can’t seen any of the original screen print, so I suppose the universe has spoken on that account in my favor.

Typeface Sample

The typeface on this SM3 is a somewhat uncommon (though not rare as some might contend) Congress Elite No. 84 at 11 pitch or 2.3m/m. (I’d suspect it’s probably rarer in the U.S. compared to Germany or the rest of Europe, but have no data beyond my limited colloquial experience to support this.)

A type sample from my machine with its custom typeset and a new ribbon appears below.

Close up of the typebasket and Congress Elite typeface on a 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter. The typeface is gleamingly clean. — Though upside down, you can see the faint Upsilon and end parenthesis characters next to the “9” key which needed some restoration.

Sound

Here’s a sound sample of inserting a sheet of paper, aligning it writing a sentence, the bell, and a return with more typing on my 1958 Olympia SM3:

Future

While I do like the difference in typeface, I’m not sure how much use this machine will get with my finely tuned and very similar 1958 SM3 which has an elite typeface I really love. There are still a few paces I want to put this typewriter through and one or two fine tuning adjustments I’ll likely make, but perhaps I may consider selling this?

It’s now in excellent condition and I may recover the original platen and rubber to enhance it even further. The issue may become how much to list it for as a potential sale? It has several uncommon features which may appeal to a serious collector who doesn’t clean and service their own machines, but who wants one of the most collectible machines out there with a few exotic features that is ready to type on from day one.

Photo Gallery

Close up of a frontal view of a 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter in green crinkle paint with shiny dark green keys and a brownish-green spacebar.

View down onto the left of a 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter with the carriage return arm in the front.

Table level view of a green 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter. The chrome of the carriage and carriage return arm along with chrome trim on the typewriter hood and along the bottom of the typewriter and it's feet really shines and reflects back in the glass tabletop on which it sits. Out of focus in the background is a book case and a wall with photos.

Left oblique view from the rear of a 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter. Strongly featured is the long shiny chrome carriage return arm which looms out over the typewriter's hood. This machine is clean and shiny.

Medium shot from the rear looking down at a green 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter. We can barely see the keys at the top of the photo.

Table level view of a 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter. At the top we see three vents where the paper rest is hiding. Below that is a silver bar on which six rectangular tab stops are bunched together. Just below them is a silver square placard which announces the manufacturer from Western Germany and the name and address of the US importer.

View inside the hood of a 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter from the rear.

Oblique angle from the rear of three sides of the 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter. The chrome on this machine really shines.

Angle onto the right side of a green 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter sitting on a steel gray desk with a glass top. In the background we can see a small portion of two filing cabinets

Focus into the typebasket of a 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter featuring a mirrorlike chrome badge featuring the red script lettering that reads "De Luxe". There is a very wet, new black and red ribbon installed. The lighting of the photo creates an almost diffuse, dreamlike quality.

Close up of the top row of typewriter keys 5-9 and the typeface slugs with a Congress elite typeface on a 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter

A clean 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter sits on a sun-dappled cafe table on an outdoor porch with a white railing. The table also has a small potted plant, a notebook and a green coffee mug. It's a calming typing environment to be sure.

A green crinkle painted Olympia SM3 with chrome highlights, green plastic keys, and a greenish-brown space bar sits on a sun dappled table next to a small potted plant. Off to the side are a small notebook, mechanical pencil and green coffee mug creating a very cozy morning atmosphere.

More progress on the 1931 New Orga (Privat 5): he types! I found some compatible spools and ribbon. Given the Orga typewriter from the movie, I thought this Willy Wonka quote was apropos both as the first type sample and as encouragement for the remainder of the restoration mountain ahead.

On colloquial advice for degreasing, cleaning, and oiling manual typewriters

Let’s think about a few of the factors at play when it comes to cleaning and oiling advice for typewriters. Two major factors at play are knowledge (and its dispersal) and the availability of materials and tools.

Most typists are hobbyists coming to the space with little to no knowledge. Often they’re further hampered by the fact that they don’t have the original manual for their machine and so can’t look up the original equipment manufacturer’s recommendations even if they existed in the original manual. Hint: few manuals gave good advice about this other than to wipe them down weekly and not to let eraser cast-offs go into the machine—anyone who’s had a few typewriters knows how that advice went over historically. Other manuals will recommend regular or annual servicing by technicians who aren’t as ubiquitous as they were back in the day.

Perhaps we ought to harken back to early World War II when typewriter manufacture ceased the first time, typewriter donations to the war effort went up thereby making them more valuable on the domestic front, and the typewriter repair workforce went off to the front? The U.S. Government made a concerted effort to help preserve and protect the machines in circulation with both the War Department making and circulating films and the Treasury Department publishing manuals like Typewriter Care (1945).

When modern typists do get information, it’s often colloquial and under-informed or it’s based on someone’s everyday experience elsewhere or grounded in some small amount of common sense. Many times its outright bad. This is why so many people will turn to everyday household items like rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, gun oil, sewing machine oil, 3-and-1 oil, and WD-40 to clean and lubricate their machines. These items have been used for these purposes in other arenas and they’re often readily available in the average users’ homes. This readiness to hand will almost always beat a trip to a specialized store to purchase custom solvents, oils, and/or appropriate cleaning tools and dispensers with which they have less first-hand knowledge.

Worse, solid cleaning and lubricating advice by modern day typewriter repair people isn’t easily found or uncovered. (Though it does happen sometimes.) Even if it were, they’d all have a variety of suggestions and practices which were individualized based on their own experience and training as well as the time period in which they learned and practiced it. There are a few good ones on YouTube, but broadly they’re not recognized by a more mainstream public. The few in the type-o-sphere who are better known also have a variety of techniques and methods, and frequently have more custom tools and dispensers at hand than the average home mechanic/typist.

We also don’t have books like Hints for a Happy Typewriter (Bryan Kravitz, 1983), which dispenses some relatively useful advice to the average home typist when manual typewriters were still in use, but about to wane with the increasing ubiquity of electric machines, and the advent of word processors and computers. Even in this brief primer, some of the suggestions would seem quaint for the current home typist-mechanic who now ought to have more knowledge at their disposal and may not be able to rely on a local repair shop being just around the corner.

A search for “how to clean a typewriter” unearths a variety of really good resources in the top 10 hits including the typosphere’s Richard Polt‘s excellent advice. Yet somehow people want to ask on Reddit everyday without searching either the internet or the Reddit sub itself because advice from complete strangers with no bona-fides is somehow really valuable in a field of practice which hasn’t advanced a lot in the last 50 years.

Many years have passed since the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) made these machines, and during that time, materials for cleaning and servicing them have shifted and changed. In some cases they don’t exist anymore, or have changed and become better.

As an example, in the early years, typewriter manufacturers including this Underwood manual from 1920 recommend using gasoline to clean one’s type slugs. This was common practice until Stoddard’s formula (aka Varsol) was invented in 1924 for safer use in dry cleaning. Surely no one is using gasoline anymore despite the ubiquity of gasoline in our environment. It’s highly flammable, it’s difficult to dispense, and it smells dreadful. Surely it had gone out of vogue by the time of the OPEC oil embargo in 1973.

Later on people used Roytype Typewriter Type Cleaner in 2 ounce bottles which was touted as “non inflammable”! I’m sure that 2 ounces of Roytype cleaner was priced higher than a gallon of mineral spirits today. If you’re a purist, perhaps you’re buying new original stock (NOS) online, but at a crazy mark up?

Another bygone example comes from Kravitz’s 1983 home handbook mentioned above which, in addition to alcohol, recommends the use of trichloroethane as a solvent for cleaning type slugs and internals. Trichloroethane manufacture and use has almost completely disappeared since 1996, when it was identified by the Montreal Protocol as a contributor to ozone depletion.

When mineral spirits, lacquer thinner, and other industrial solvents are reasonably available, they’re often in large cans and require transfer into smaller bottles with custom tips for more easily dispensing into typewriters. Taking the time to do this with a good brass-bristled brush is additional work when compared to the alcohol and Q-tips or extra toothbrushes that most people already have at home.

Then most of the common advice about these more caustic degreasers includes the fact that they shouldn’t be put on platens, plastic, paint, decals, or other surfaces which can cause them to dissolve, melt, or otherwise damage them. How many home mechanics are going to remove the requisite typewriter body pieces to properly clean their machines when most are afraid of taking off even the most easily removed screws on body panels? Fear of destroying the exterior of their machines is demotivating. It’s even more demotivating when you take it all off, clean it out, put it back together only to realize the next day your keys are still sticky and need an additional treatment (or two). Was blowing the solvents and dissolved dirt and oil out with compressed air really that necessary? (Yes) Why didn’t anyone tell me I should wait a half a day or more to make sure it would really be fully cleaned out?

And of course, after all that, you mean to tell me that Duane of Phoenix Typewriter has been using lacquer thinner to clean platens and rollers for over 40 years…

Storage and usage conditions also need to be taken into account, both for the products as well as for the typewriters themselves.

Many solvents are not only toxic, but highly flammable. In the case of most (and especially substances like gasoline and naphtha, which is literally used as lighter fluid) care needs to be taken to prevent potential fires as well as having proper ventilation.

On the typewriter side, their frequency of use and the conditions in which they’re stored are going to vary widely from the person who has one on display for infrequent use to the collector who has hundreds which are also in infrequent use to typists who have one or more in regular use, but who also aren’t using them with the frequency of a transcriptionist from the 1950s who typed for eight hours a day.

For the uninitiated, Mineral spirits (US) or White spirit (UK), also known as mineral turpentine, turpentine substitute, petroleum spirits, solvent naphtha (petroleum), varsol, Stoddard solvent, or, generically, “paint thinner”, is a petroleum-derived clear, transparent liquid used as a common organic solvent especially in painting. Just the number of names and varieties of mineral spirit become off-putting to most typists. Which one is the “right” one? (In daily practice, really any of them for sale at the local hardware, paint, or art supply stores will work.) Add this to recommendations of other types of automotive degreasers (like carburetor cleaners, engine degreasers, etc.) which come under the brand names of a huge variety of companies all of which have different ingredients and you’re asking for a mess, particularly when these enter the colloquial advice space. And how many are regularly warning their users that some of these degreasers stink to high heaven in comparison to mineral spirits?

Naturally the underwhelming advice to try isopropyl or rubbing alcohol and Q-Tips seems lovely and expedient. No serious typewriter mechanic would recommend rubbing alcohol of any sort because it contains water and is more likely to cause subsequent rusting to typewriter internals. Even industrial grade isopropyl will have a water in it as well as keytones and acetones which, again, will tend to strip paint and melt plastic. It doesn’t help that isopropyl isn’t the greatest degreaser, though with some mechanical friction, it will certainly help clean up and wash some material out when it’s the only thing available. The better advice is to use one of the family of mineral spirits.

Some materials may be used more frequently by some typists solely because of their alternate uses in the home/garage and thus ease of accessibility. Susan, who likes working on her ’65 Corvette on weekends, may be more likely to have carburetor cleaner out in the garage, so naturally that’s what she’ll want to use to degrease the internals of her typewriter. Meanwhile, her husband Bob who loves his matte Batman-blue fingernail polish is more likely to use his nail-polish remover (aka Acetone) to clean off his type slugs on a weekly basis. Once they’ve appreciated having done this, they’re far more likely to recommend these methods to others. Perhaps if their 10 year old son Jimmy was consulted, he’d recommend the expedience of his Silly Putty for typeface cleaning because he knows it’s a reasonable facsimile of Eberhardt Faber’s Star type cleaner from the 1940s. (And it can be fun to play with when the muse isn’t visiting your typewriter desk.)

Now, the worst of the problem is that most of the sources of misinformation spread are typewriter fora on the internet. Every day someone shows up on one of the common typewriter spaces on Reddit or Facebook asking how to fix and or clean a typewriter. (No one thinks to search these spaces to see the answer from the day before.) The answer they get will naturally default to the lowest common denominator because professional typewriter repair people and mechanics are almost never the ones showing up to answer the question. They’re going to get the same regurgitated colloquial and anecdotal advice everyone else got or used. It will continue to spread on this way until someone aggregates actual advice from trained typewriter repair people. If only we had a solid wiki for documenting, footnoting, and referencing all this sort of advice? Fortunately most of the colloquial advice is close enough, easy enough, and works relatively well.

Even if typists were advised to use WD-40, things wouldn’t be horribly bad as long as they were daily typists who protected their machines against dirt and dust and had them serviced occasionally. WD-40 has been and can be used as a form of degreaser and lubricant for some applications and as long as it isn’t set to dry out and freeze up in combination with dust and dirt most typewriters might fair well enough with it. The bigger problem is when one uses it temporarily and then leaves their typewriter to sit for months or years at a time at which point the isoparaffin, dust, and dirt are going to have solidified and frozen the machine up again, potentially worse than before. I shudder to think of the number of perfectly good dirty typewriters people have thrown out over issues like this. (Hopefully only marginally more than those who disposed of machines because they accidentally had them on the stencil setting.)

Certainly typewriter shops love buying these “damaged” machines for pennies on the dollar, spending a few minutes dousing them with mineral spirits, blowing them out and marking them up hundreds of dollars. (At least this is better than the bottom feeders buying them from Goodwill and marking them up significantly without any repair work at all.)

Oiling Typewriters

When it comes to oiling advice all the same factors about knowledge and materials come into play. What should be oiled and what shouldn’t? What types of oil should I use? 3 in 1 oil, silicone sprays, mineral oils, gun oils (like Rem Oil), sewing machine oil, or other forms of light machine oil? Most people are sure to have one or more of these available at home already, but they’re also likely to have it in larger quantities either in liquid form or in spray can form which means they’re going to dramatically over-oil their machines.

Generally, over-oiling isn’t a problem when the machine is in regular daily use and some level of service is given to it every few years. It will get flushed out and re-applied frequently enough not to be an issue.

But are all modern typewriter users using their machines every day like they were in the past? When a machine sits on a shelf for too long, this oil is going to pick up particulate matter and tend to gum itself up again. As a result, collectors with large collections are probably well-advised to stay away from heavily oiling their machines in much the same way that they don’t want to leave ribbons on their unused machines as they’re prone to dry out over time or leave their paper release levers engaged which is prone to flattening out your platen and rubber paper rollers over time. (You’re guilt of these, I know you are. Go ahead and fix it now on those dozens of typewriters sitting idle in your collection.)

Here the best general advice is to provide very light machine oil in very small quantities and placed in targeted areas including the carriage rails, ball bearings, and, when necessary, on type bar linkages.

What you don’t want to end up with a decade hence is “Frozen Facit Syndrome”, a description common to old Facit typewriters which frequently have a frozen escapement mechanism because, as is sometimes colloquially stated, “someone at Facit thought it would be fun to use cod grease”.

Oiling the segment can be the most problematic as most typewriter segments were machined with incredibly close tolerances for movement against them. Any sort of oil (and especially WD-40) will tend to not only dry out over time, but because the segment is the most exposed internal part of the typewriter, it will gather more dust and dirt than other parts. The close tolerances then close up with gunk and the type bars have more friction eventually causing them to freeze up.

Where to from here?

Colloquial advice is sure to continue apace online. How, then to keep it reasonably solid?

Perhaps we might design a questionnaire to send to typewriter repair shops to see what the state of the art was? Then future hobbyists and typewriter repair schools will have better resources for teaching the cleaning and maintenance portions of their curricula.

Maybe someone will aggregate all the cleaning product recommendations and order them from least abrasive to most, from least toxic to most? This would allow the novice to start simple and increase the power as necessary or appropriate.

Maybe a more comprehensive wiki like The Typewriter Wiki will fill the space for long term advice with proper referencing and supporting materials?

References

Maintenance of Office Machines. 16 mm. Vol. MN-1513. United States Navy Training Film, 1943. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocdxgkxKAKo.

Hausrath, Alfred H., and Eugene L. Dahl. Typewriter Care. Edited by Walter K.M. Slavik. Federal Work Improvement Program United States Civil Service Commission and Government Division, U.S. Treasury Department, 1945. http://archive.org/details/twcare-1945.

Munk, Theodore. “The Typewriter Database,” 2012. https://typewriterdatabase.com/.

Pearce, H. G. Complete Instructions: How to Repair, Rebuild, and Adjust Underwood Typewriters With Handy Reference for Locating Trouble Quickly. Bridgeport, CT: Typewriter Mechanics Publishing Co., 1920. https://johnesimmons.com/Typewriter/Articles/Manualpdf/Underwood_Repair_Manual.pdf.

Polt, Richard. “The Classic Typewriter Page : All About Typewriters,” 2009. https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/index.html.