ASR-33 Teletype: Part 3
The keyboard is now greased, oiled, and (hopefully) ready to go! I decided to remove all of the keys and all of the codebars (the metal strips with notches in them under the keys) to make oiling easier. Almost every point where two parts have contact (like the pivots on the ends of the codebars or the contact points where the keys hit a metal spring under the keyboard) needed a few drops of oil. A precision oiler was incredibly helpful and sped things up immensely, while minimizing the oil spilled on the table... In the last post I mentioned replacing the ESC key with the ALT MODE key from a different keyboard. I decided to keep the original ESC key after all. This decision was made because the two keys were not identical as I thought, and on each keyboard the CTRL keys had a different design as well. I assume that the ESC key would be coded the same as the ALT MODE key, but to be safe I left it as it was. In the future I may consider swapping the CTRL keys and the ESC/ALT MODE keys ...