Parts machines and the 1929 Remington 3

Beautiful machine isn’t it? I thought so too. The paint In that lovely 2 tone red caught my eye. It was an eBay auction I scored for $50. Nobody bid on it because it was a rusty pile of garbage. So here’s another short and sweet post full of BTS photos on how I got this thing working again.

One of my only before shots

Grime and dirt, all frozen up

Of course, the first thing I did with this machine was strip and polish the body panels. I was very eager to see how these colors shined up, and I was not disappointed. The paint was virtually mint. The body is very easy to remove on these machines, you just need to watch for the shift disengage pin threaded through the back. Make sure you remember how it sits, and remove it by undoing the knob at the rear. When you slide the machine out of the lower shell, two of the rear screws will undo a horizontal support rod. Don’t forget to put that back In place.

Platen rod exits the LEFT

All of the rubber on this machine was shot. You can see from the photos that t was hard and brittle. I ended up having to take a hammer and a knife to hack off all the old rubber, and replaced it with shrink tube. Unfortunately I ran out of material halfway through, and shelved the project working on 7 other machines instead. Standard run of the mill projects I won’t be writing about, such as an obscenely over oiled Dreyfus QDL, a script Galaxie, a pink silent super, an underwood 5, and 3 wide.....yeah. It was busy. Everyone wanted to bring me their machines pre-lockdown, but now work is winding down. I’m down to my last two projects, but they are intensive ones.

See, there are those projects. Not all of them, just a few, and a few more coming as other separate projects.

Shining up all that rust

The bulk of the work consisted of using a rotary brush tool in my power drill to get rid of all the old grime and dirt. The machine itself got a bath to flush out all the eraser shavings and steel wool junk, and a few mechanical adjustments as well. It isn’t perfect work, as I would like, but It works better than it ever should have in the first place. It is off to a new home now, and I hope if it isn’t used, it still brings joy as an excellent display piece.