Stoewer KsM. Spooky Scary Skeleton-shift machine
Stoewer Kleinschreibmaschine (KsM for short). I worked once on its younger sister, Rheinmetall KsT although it was not my machine. Until now I never owned one of them so when I saw Stoewer for sale I grabbed it.
Adam claims that these are best of the best of the best (with honors) portable typewriters. I had to try myself.
First thing I noticed is that this is also a skeleton-shift machine. Same as Rheinmetal KsT.
It also has this cool feature: carriage removal is very easy, just flip two latches on the back and voila!
My specimen was mostly very dirty and lacked some screws.
Disassembled for cleaning.
Paper-feed rollers were in good shape, just hardened and dirty.
I removed 0.2mm of oxidized rubber to expose still elastic rubber underneath. No need to fabricate new, yet.
Everything is very robust on this machine. After removing the platen (standard procedure, central rod can be removed from either side) nothing falls into pieces and all stay in place, firmly secured.
Skeleton-shift has a main advantage of lower mass being lifted upon shifting but also: shift adjustments (fine-tuning) is right there, very accessible.
Apart from dust and some dirt my machine had some surface corrosion on chrome-plated controls. Since there is no trace of that anywhere else inside the mechanism I recon it was bad plating and/or previous users were sweating very corrosively…
I’d rather have no plating than corroded one so I polished away damaged plating up to clear steel. Satin finish is my preference in that case.
A few of glass keys have custom, hand-made legends. I could, of course, change that to one matching the rest of the keyboard but I decided to leave them in place.
They tell a story, although I don’t know what is that story.
With carriage removed one can study closely parts of exposed mechanism. End-of-line lock and the bell are a robust and refined assembly.
Ribbon advance is directly connected with spring motor advance.
All threads are metric on this machine so I could easily replace missing screws using my stock of old screws from the same era.
Machine put back together and waxed with Fulgentine.
Test typing with (almost) fresh ribbon. All seems to be good!
Typing action is very pleasant, the mechanism is tuned and very snappy.
Traditional photo session followed.
Serial number is clearly visible on the back. According to this source my machine was produced sometime between 1926 - 1930 in German Stettin (today it is Szczecin, in Poland).
