[GreenKeys] [External] Teletype purchase/restoration

[Jones, Douglas W]

From: London Night via GreenKeys [greenkeys at mailman.qth.net] -- Monday, December 28, 2020 6:53 PM

> Hello. Let me introduce myself. My name is Alex, ... in Timisoara, Romania ...
> So I set out on a quest of finding myself 2 previously working teletype machines ...
> I don't know what would be the best course of action in finding 

I had a colleague who visited my department here in Iowa, from Latvia.  Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, he had served for a while in the Russian army, and his job in the Army was to service Teletypes.  Specifically, the Russian Teletypes were East German machines that were based on a design licensed from Teletype by Siemens & Halske before World War II.

I had recently restored a Teletype Model 33 (a 1960s design) and he really enjoyed visiting my restoration lab -- he said it brought back wonderful memories of working with these machies.  The details, of course, are all different, but the fundamental principles are all the same.  Siemens changed from using North-American screw standards to Metric screws, and many dimensions shifted slightly.  My 1960's machine had features alien to the earlier Teletypes, but the underlying working principles for doing binary logic with levers and sliding rods are the same.

So my advice, in Romania, is to search out the surplus from old Cold-War era military and government communications infrastructure.  It is highly likely that there are a fair number of old East German Siemens machines growing rust somewhere near you and available for very little money.

One useful thing to know is that, if you can get two machines, and if you are willing to completely disassemble them you can probably make one working machine, robbing broken or missing parts from the other.  Start with three machines, and there is a good chance you'll be able to make two good ones.  You may have to completely disassemble the machines all the way down to individual pieces of metal, then completely de-oil and de-rust them before cleaning, reassembling and re-oiling.

If you start with three machines, you can always keep one fully assembled to use as a reference to know how to reassemble the pieces.  If you start with two machines, you need to keep very careful notes.  I found that string and paper tags help immensely.  When you remove a piece, note on the paper tag the order of disassembly and where it came from, then tie the tag to the piece with string.  During reassembly, work in reverse numerical order.  This is hard work, but many old Teletypes have been restored from the edge of ruin to working condition.

Good luck!

               Doug Jones
               jones at cs.uiowa.edu