[GreenKeys] Flexowriter

[Jones, Douglas W]

A student of mine has begun work on the Singer/Friden 2201 Flexowriter that I acquired in 1993.  It was brand new in 1965.  The thing seemed to be in great condition when we brought it up out of my basement and moved it into the lab, but:

On opening up the machine, we found a rather large and elaborate mouse nest occupying the space above and around the motor.  Fiberglass insulation (carted down a bit at a time from my attic, I suspect) combined with down (from a sleeping bag in storage somewhere in the basement? -- I must hunt for that).  Ugh.  Also, the mice used a good chunk of typewriter ribbon in their nesting efforts.  Must get a new ribbon.

Fortunately, after removing the mess, we found no evidence of any wire chewing, except for one motor lead.  The rubber had been chewed off, but not a single strand of the actual wire was damaged, so we use heat-shrink tubing to repair it instead of trying to replace a motor lead.

I took a boatload of photos today.  I've posted two photos to Wikimedia Commons since they fill a gap in the documentation of plugboard programmable devices:

-- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flexowriter2201RelayLogic.JPG
-- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flexowriter2201Plugboard.JPG

I didn't know it when I took the photos, but the fiberglass insulation you see below the plugboard in the second photo is mouse nest and not installed there by the manufacturer.

There are an awful lot of relays there, and once you open up the machine, you find it has way more belts that a teletype.  Separate belts drive the paper-tape punch and paper-tape reader, while the main belt goes from the motor to the drive roller.

My guess is that it won't be too difficult to get this machine working, but we'll see.  After cleaning out the mouse nest and some general dusting (the machine is in pretty good shape generally), we oiled all the oil points we could find.  Tomorrow, we'll go over the aux paper-tape reader looking other general clean-up, and then start worrying about functionality.  We've gone through a fair amount of alcohol, goo-gone, paper towels and Qtips so far cleaning things.

		Doug Jones
		jones at cs.uiowa.edu