Selectric trouble

[John Floren]

On 3/1/08, Barry Watzman <Watzman at neo.rr.com> wrote:
> I am not a selectric guru, but I have one and I think that the most likely
>  cause is that the lubricant has dried out, isn't lubricating and in fact is
>  acting like glue or adhesive.  The "right" way to fix this is to have the
>  whole mechanism immersed in a bath of solvent (quite a few things have to be
>  disassembled and removed before this is done) to clean off the old
>  lubricant, and then relubricated afterwards.  This used to be common, but
>  there are not many places now that still do it and it's expensive (probably
>  a couple hundred dollars).  I have a full IBM service manual for the
>  Selectric II, which is virtually identical to your machine, but I only have
>  it in hard copy, not PDF, and it's bound.  Perhaps there is a PDF copy of
>  this manual on the 'net somewhere.  A guy who did the immersion cleaning
>  used to advertise his service on E-Bay, you might to a search there, or a
>  google search.
>
>

Now, interestingly, I turned it on this morning and was able to type
fine again for
maybe 8 lines. As I typed, the carriage return speed got slower and slower until
it would no longer reach the left margin. This leads me to believe
that there might be some sort of problem where a pulley has grease
that eventually warms up and causes it to slip, or something of that
nature.
I'll try to look for disassembly instructions online and see if I can
open it up and clean out the pulleys related to carriage return.

John
-- 
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn