Typewriter Basics: Underwood 5 Setup 

Excited to see this! I found one today on a visit to the city. Before I left with it, I knew all the keys worked and the carriage could move back and forth. Some of the keys are mushy. And the margins are difficult to set. My machine will need a lot of cleaning. But I'm thrilled to find it in such good condition. And I'm thrilled to find this video to explain how to do everything. There was no manual included. The ideas on setting up the margins were very helpful. I didn't catch all the details on the paper fingers when tinkering with my own machine. Anyway, after some cleaning, and after I figure out why the right margin can't be adjusted, I'm excited to add this machine to my collection! The typing experience on it was actually pretty nice!

Hi Joe, Ran across your channel by chance, typewriters remind me of my dad, Ward. You may remember him from way back. I hope you and your family are doing well 😊

Wow! What a video! I am probably the only guy on the planet who didn’t know that the right hand of the scale set the left margin and that will save me a lot of time when I get mine going. Thank you very much. And the video quality in delivery of the information was great. Very easy to understand for a beginner like myself.

Joe, Thanks so much for the invaluable information and instruction. I have my newly acquired Underwood #5 and am becoming familiar with it until I receive my ribbon from Ribbons Unlimited. The only thing I'm somewhat uncertain about is the bell, which my seller advised may need some slight adjustment. From what I can tell, the hammer is resting on the bell, so it doesn't ring. Again, I'm glad I found your channel.

Great video, thanks!

thank you for everything

Hi Joe, thanks for the video and the nice technique for finding the left margin setting. I've got a bit of an alternate technique. I fold a sheet of paper in half, then line it up such that at the 40 mark a character will type right on the centre line. This makes your paper centred at 40 and lets you use the Underwood centring scale as they designed it. The trade-off is that 0 doesn't correspond to the edge of your page. However, a nice positive in addition to being able to use the centring scale is that you can figure out a length of writing line centred off 40. For example a 60-space line can be set up with margins at 10 and 70 (subtract 30 from 40 on either side), and you know it will be centred. Thanks for all your great typewriter content!

Great tutorial, Joe. Hope you’re enjoying your #5 as much as I am mine. 🙏🏻👊🏻

Thank you very much. I have one of these to fix. It will not return to the position after shifting. I haven’t watched it yet, but I hope it helps.

A beauty!

Beeeautifully crafted standard machine, the Underwood, one of the earliest 'visible', that made the concept of visible typewriting, well, standard. No wonder, being the first viable visible standard, everything was unusual and kinda reversed. It is one of the very few standard machine that I would be interested in.. the other is the unreal Olivetti M1 (with rotating shafts cynematic, to avoid violating any previous patent).

On an elite machine, are you doing 12 cpi (or 11 cpi) as the case may be?

Left margin? Is not the margin slider on the right side the setting for the right margin?

The your profile picture on internet (RU-vid channel) is from when you were a baby. It is too dark too. Change.🙏.

Nice machine, highly inefficient design.

I 👍 mechanical and portable typewriters.