Royal Re-Refurb

Right about a year ago, I found a Royal Empress, in a nasty, scratched-n-nicked taupe color, just begging for a refurb.

This was during the height of the Silver-Surferization sweeping the typosphere. Since this machine was all-steel, and couldn't just be stripped, I tried some of that cheap, metallic-silver paint. The results were poor, to say the least.



Doesn't look too godawful in this pic, but the paint was poorly applied. It never dried. At all. I pulled the cover off the thing a few weeks ago to find the paint still sticky - which had pretty nearly ruined the cover, and left nasty, ugly paint-stripped patches all over the typer.

If you ever have a hankerin' to try that shiny metallic paint? Don't.

So, I stripped the thing again - I'm getting pretty good at dis- and re-assembly of this particualr machine: I only had to hail Alan Seaver once in an absolute panic. My intention this time was to produce the Lord Vader effect which (as I recall) was the idea of Elizabeth of Little Flower Petals.

So, I hung the parts out on the line (after spending several days removing the previous paint-job and sanding and priming the steel for a new paint job) and sprayed them all down with a glossy black paint. I topped it off with multiple clear-coat applications. It looked great, from a distance.





But up close?
The Royal, as you can see, has enormous, broad expanses of surface area. Way more than the machine's innards would require. The hard thing about these huge metal planes is that it's hard to get a uniform coat of paint on them. It was rather splotchy.

In a funk, I asked Mrs. Moon for her opinion. She recommended jettisoning the whole Vader thing (which, I'm sure she meant, was kind of pathetic and nerdy anyway - she was too kind, though, to actually say this...) and to give it a light coat - a dusting - of a bronze paint she'd bought for another project.

The end result, I think, is way better. Looks classy to my eyes.







And the best part is that the paint dried wonderfully, and - while I had the innards exposed - I cleaned out all the mechanisms with Carb & Choke Cleaner (thank you, Mike Brown) and then re-lubricated it. I was able to fix the faulty right margin stop. Now it's a beautiful, functional Royal.