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IBM Actionwriter 1 Typewriter - Anyone know anything about these?

Eudimorphodon

Eudimorphodon

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Was at the Goodwill this morning with the kid, striking out on looking for Halloween craft stuff and marveling at how overpriced most of the stuff seemed to be, when I saw an IBM Actionwriter 1 electric typewriter on the shelf for only $7.79. Physically it looked almost pristine, so I figured for that price it had to be dead... but I also figured it might have some interesting parts I might be able to reuse (maybe the keyboard?) so I bit.

To cut to the chase, the typewriter seems to mostly work just fine. In fact for a while I thought it worked perfectly, but I've noticed that if you type a whole page worth of text the unit will seemingly crash/reset spontaneously once in a while; it'll stop responding to the keyboard for a second or to, and then it'll home the carriage and make a similar noise to when it's initially turned on. So...

Googling around I was able to find the users manual for it, and I've also found the information that the guts of this typewriter are actually not "pure IBM" (the type mechanism was manufactured by Alder/Royal, apparently), but other than that it seems kind of a desert out there. I'm not sure why but after playing with it I kind of want to try to fix it instead of going straight to stripping it for parts, would anyone have a lead on how to take this thing apart the "right" way? I'm kind of hoping these spontaneous resets might be some low hanging fruit like crusty capacitors in the PSU or something, but I also know from past experience with these sort of things that if I just start randomly turning screws to get the case off I might inadvertently do something bad to the print mechanism. If anyone has any hints on where to look for info I'd really appreciate it.

(It seems like this thing was only sold for a couple years, but on the flip side there seem to be a lot of them on eBay, so I don't know what the deal is.)
 
I suspect that many of these have been cannibalized for their keyboards.

I still have a Correcting Selectric III sitting in a closet waiting for me to screw up the courage to replace the belt (which I have). Thing scares the dickens out of me with all those little springs.
 
Yeah, I don’t blame you at all for fearing the Selectric Pandora’s box. Those things are like… Elven technology.

This Actionwriter looks *relatively* simple by comparison, in that it’s “just” a Daisywheel with a keyboard… but it still has that whole Chinese Puzzle thing going in terms of just getting the case open, and I suspect it has an interesting board sandwich going on under the keyboard.
 
I saw it hiccup once just sitting there, which I’m optimistically (?) taking as evidence it’s random flakiness, but I guess I’ll find out.
 
could very well still be the PSU. On the far end of scale my Crimson prior to being recapped would randomly drop and recover the DC rails because cap leakage was confusing the supply controller.
 
I left the typewriter on for about an hour today, poking at it occasionally, and oddly I don’t think it hiccuped once. I’m starting to wonder if the time it was on yesterday ended up brute-force reforming some capacitors that had been sitting for possibly decades. That’s… not great, it suggests I should still pull it open and at least visually check for bulges and leaks, but self healing is also nice, I suppose.

(And now wait for the next power cycle, when something spectacularly grenades…)
 
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