Misadventures in Typing: The Ribbon War

I found out the hard way that you really shouldn't need any
of these things to change a typewriter ribbon.

Changing a typewriter ribbon is a pretty simple task.  But unfortunately, this is only true if you have the faintest idea of what you're doing.  This is sort of embarrassing to recount...

I began, as one does, by trying to remove the dried out ribbon that was already in my Corona 4.  I wasn't able to get to the spools, so I assumed that the small screws around the base of the spool housing had to be removed.  This was totally wrong, but it still took me about an hour to figure this out for myself.  The screws on the left side of the typewriter came off without a problem and I was able to remove the cover that protected that spool.  The screws on the right side were more stubborn.  I sprayed them with WD-40, hoping it would help loosen them, then I used a hairdryer, hoping that the heat would make it easier to dislodge them.  Finally, I was able to unscrew one of them, but the other two were really stubborn.  Removing the one screw had afforded me a bit of give, so I tried to wiggle the base back and forth to break up whatever it was that was causing the screws to stick.  At first I wiggled it gently, then a bit harder.  Then a lot harder.  Then the spool cover popped off--without budging the screws.  Apparently, I could have just squeezed the spool cover to get it off.  Good to know.

Having removed both spool covers, I was able to disengage the old ribbon.  Turns out that the old ribbon had spools made of metal, which looked pretty cool, so I decided to keep them.  Now it was finally time to add the new ribbon.  One problem: the new ribbon's spools didn't fit.  Did they send me the right ribbon?  They did.  Did I ask for the right ribbon?  I did.   Weird.

Oh, well.  The new ribbon had spools made of plastic so it was pretty easy to trim them enough to get them to fit.  The covers fit over the scaled-down spool with no problem.  Time to type!

It was so satisfying to watch the letters come out a nice, solid black, but something still wasn't right.  As I typed, the vibrations caused the ribbon to unspool.  Had I trimmed the spools too much?  Then I realized that I also couldn't respool the ribbon without removing the spool case again.  Something was definitely wrong here.

A little internet research revealed that typewriters this old (1925) were incompatible with the more modern plastic spools.  Instead, the ribbon has to be removed from the plastic spools and rewound onto the typewriter's original metal spools (as near as I can tell, not throwing out these metal spools was the only thing I did correctly).  Twenty minutes and two charcoal black hands later and I was finally in business.

As annoying an episode as this was, I still feel like every mistake I make helps me to learn a little more about these amazing machines (though, there's also probably something to be said for researching a task before undertaking it...).