The Shilling Brother's #22


This machine has seen better days but not by much.  What is most interesting is not the design of the machine itself, but it's history.  To break it down a little, I'll start by mentioning that this machine is basically a re-branded Pittsburg, specifically the Visible 12.  And no, the Shilling Brothers didn't make 22 Models.  They made one model only, the number 22, and of that model there are five surviving examples.

The Shilling Brothers, Herman and Welzie were born in the late 1800s in Illinois.  Their parents divorced at a young age and both boys were raised by their father.  They eventually went on to become travelling typewriter salesmen.  When the duo were in their early 20s, around 1913, they opened up the Fort Pitt Typewriter Company.  This company didn't explicitly produce machines, rather they sold and serviced existing machines using the knowledge they gained traveling about in the years prior.  In the 1920s, they moved to an expanded space in Downtown Pittsburgh and continued selling typewriters of various manufacturers.  It was around this time that they produced their own model.  It is unclear whether or not they were personally responsible for the production of the machine or not.  It seems more likely given its near identical construction to the visible 12 that this was just a matter of re-branding.  The first advertisement of the machine appears in January of 1922 according to Robert Messenger, over at the OZ typewriter blog.  Robert also mentions that the Shilling brothers purchased certain assets of the Pittsburg Writing Machine Co. in 1921, a year prior to their advertised machine.  The Fort Pitt company met with substantial success, and there were also plans to create the "Fort Pitt" typewriter, but as far as anyone seems to be aware, this did not happen.

Check out the blog post here: at the OZ typewriter blog

The Shilling 22 is a very interesting machine, identical in construction to several other models.  It is in every sense of the word a finicky machine, and I will get into why that is here.  Taking the machine down to clean is a very simple process.  There are four finger screws, two on either side of the frame.  These, when removed, allow the front panel to slide forwards and out, giving access to the type box of the machine.  The entire typebox and keybaord assembly lift out of the machine, giving one unrestricted access to the escapement.  Shift alignment is controlled with locknuts on either side of the type box, and the escapement is controlled by the forward facing bar along the base of the machine.  This bar sits a little lower than the one towards the back, which controls the ribbon vibrator.  The escapement bar is also responsible for the ribbon transport.  Once the machine is broken down into two self-contained units, it is very apparent how the machine works.  It is incredibly simplistic in it's internal construction made with sparse and somewhat flimsy parts.  This, no doubt, was the root of the issues I was tasked with fixing.


Allow me to backtrack a little bit.  This machine did not work at all.  The type was completely frozen up, and the carriage was mostly immobile.  On top of it, it needed new feed rollers and a drawband.  I was working on a very slim paycheck for this project, and had to move forward as efficiently as possible.  The platen of the machine is a little tricky to get out.  There are two clips on either side of the platen rod, which is fixed to the platen, that get removed with two tiny screws each.  The left side of the carriage must come off as well.  There are two anchoring screws that allow this to be removed, though I also removed the two detent screws as well.  Once the side of the carriage is off, the entire platen can be lifted off the machine.  These parts were set aside to be cleaned individually.


Removal of the paper tray requires next to nothing.  It lifts right out.  The feed rollers are arranged on bars in the front and the back similar to the royal portables.  The diameter of the rubber and the method with which they are slipped on makes recovering a pain in the butt.  After the feed rollers were out, I was able to get a really good look at what was causing the escapement issues.  The entire gear assembly was bent to hell.


Each time the carriage passed over the bent gear, one of the bearing track screws would get caught, requiring the carriage to be lifted up to pass over.  Re-bending the thick bracket that holds it all in place was difficult, but not only was it bent to the side, it was also bent vertically.  This prevented the star wheel from passing through the two pawls that hold it in place. Once this was fixed, the only other mechanical issue was the ribbon transport system, which refused to advance the ribbon.  This issue was mainly caused by some misalignment issue in the back of the machine.  The ribbon gear, as can be seen in the photo detailing the bent escapement, is very similar to older underwood standards.  There are two shuttles that grip the teeth in the wheel and spin it as a key is hit.  The arm that holds these parts wasn't moving high enough to trip anything, and if the bars or contact points were moved to get it working, the escapement would shift locking up the carriage.  I eventually was able to put a rubber buffer on the escapement bar underneath the machine with a cutout that allowed the spacebar (with a deeper contact point) to sit without disturbing the alignment of the escapement.  This extra material on the bar allowed the ribbon transport system to grip and spin the spools with each keystroke.


cutout isn't in this image, I did it after

The drawband was another tricky thing to replace.  The original one looked like it had been replaced at some point, it was fishing wire to the best of my knowledge, and must have snapped when the escapement bent (takes a lot of force for that to happen).  I took an old steel guitar string, either the B or the E, and doubled it up on itself and gave it a good twisting.


This looped over both the hook on the mainspring, as well as the hook on the carriage.




polishing those thumb screws

paper clip/holder thing.  Halfway between a finger and a bail

The rear end of the carriage was taken apart and polished, as well as the paper clips and the thumbscrews (not medieval torture thumb screws, but the finger screws that hold the front plate in).  The main body of the machine was cleaned off as well, and polished to the best of my ability without removing the finish or the pinstriping.  Since the finish is not glass enamel, a glossy mirror finish, some of it had worn down resulting in a few areas of shine surrounded by a sea of matte.

The type box was a different beast all together.  Forewarning, there are four indexing pins on the front face of the box.  these don't like lining back up for the screws to go in.



This section of the machine required a lot of flushing and cleaning.  There are no traditional barr springs like most machines, rather a single spring clip on the back ends of each key.  This is rather ineffective in my opinion.






Getting the transport to work was a pain.  But everything else went pretty good.  The shift alignment when all was said and done turned out flawless, and the text was pretty consistent.  The letters tend to float around, but these machines aren't necessarily known for their pristine text to begin with.  I noticed a couple interesting characters.  First, no dollar sign.  It had a pound key.  Also on the keyboard was a degree, a low sitting circumflex (no idea what it's called) and a section symbol.  These lead me to believe that it was manufactured for the UK market, not the US.  You'd be hard pressed to find a section key in the states, as well as a pound instead of freedom currency ($).

It didn't come out half bad.








Comments

  1. Great job fixing a rare machine!

    (The typewriter company is called Pittsburg, without an h. During this period in history, the city itself briefly dropped the h due to some silly Post Office regulation.)

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  2. Thank you for posting this account. Three years later, it's helping me with my project to get my Shilling Bros. cleaned and back in working order. BTW, the machine you worked on does seem to have a $ sign on the 4 slug, as well as the pound sterling sign on the - slug. This is exactly the same configuration as the keys on a late Reliance Premier of mine, and the Reliance Premier is the direct model predecessor of the Shilling Bros.

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