Last time, I had just managed to repair the disastrous jam which tore out a tiny rod deep in the heart of the machine. With much patience and ingenuity, I'd finally got it back in place, and the machine briefly seemed to work. Since then, it has spent a lot more time not working than it has working. Currently, everything is fine except that, like a math-phobic small child, it refuses to do divisions.
I spent a long time dealing with a problem which is really a great illustration of why these machines were so fiendish to service. I'll call it "The Battle of the Springs". The picture shows the two protagonists, and the second picture is a closeup of the actual battlefield, which as so often is far from the comfortable homes of the instigators.
First, a little Divisumma anatomy. Everything that happens in the machine is driven by the main camshaft. In one machine cycle (about a quarter of a second) it turns round once, and drives a single basic operation such as an addition or a subtraction. Exactly what happens depends on which key was pressed to start the cycle. Well, that's almost true. For the total and subtotal functions, there's something called the "extra cycle" which happens prior to a normal machine cycle, to preset various things. It arranges for the printer to leave an extra blank line and print in red, it disconnects the keyboard from the internal operation of the machine, and a few other things. Incidentally, it's the machinery for the extra cycle that causes the "clonk, clonk, clonk" that you hear at the end of every operation.
Another piece of the Divisumma's anatomy is the "memory", the place where quotients are built up during division, where the multiplier is held for multiplication, and which can also be used just to store an intermediate result. This register has a very different physical structure from the normal arithmetic register. It lives at the back of the machine, behind the "executors" which move values between the keyboard, the arithmetic register, and the printer. Some operations need to place a value into the memory, while others need to retrieve a value already there.
And now finally to the battlefield. Operations which need to read the memory value initiate this by releasing the long lever labelled 286 in the picture, so that it can be pulled towards the back of the machine by the spring 277. (The numbers come from the Olivetti service manual). That movement ultimately results in the vertical racks of the memory register being moved into contact with the executors at the right time. Because this is a bit like a total, in this case an extra cycle is performed, and the movement of lever 286 is permitted by the extra cycle machinery, which among many things moves forward the little tab 276m.
With me so far? But there's one problem with all this. This is just a normal operation, so although the result is to be printed, it should not be in red or have double spacing, which the extra cycle would normally do. It's the little tab 150a which, when it drops down, causes these things to happen. 276m moves forward in the extra cycle and 150a drops down. By happy chance, all these things are in the same place. So all that's needed is that when lever 286 moves backwards, the little lug 286n slides under lug 150a, which can no longer drop down, and the value is printed normally. Perfect.
Except that this is actually a race between two springs. The long spring 601 pulls 150 down (gravity could do the trick, but nothing in the Divisumma depends on gravity. It will certainly work on its back, and quite probably upside down too, although I haven't tried it). Meanwhile the short spring 277 pulls 286 backwards.
It's probably about time I told you what problem I was actually having. Sometimes, when I pressed the total key, I got a value of 999999999999, and the current value wasn't cleared. As you can imagine, it took quite a lot of tracking down to figure out what was happening. And as you can guess, I ended up in the Battlefield of the Springs, which is a long way from anything else to do with the total operation. And here's why. When 276m moves backwards, lever 286 has to follow it, and stop 150a dropping down, before 150a makes any movement. If it doesn't, 150a effectively wedges 286n and stops it moving. The result is an impasse - 150a doesn't drop, but also 286n doesn't move backwards. That means that the memory operation doesn't read the memory, but it also stops lever 286 from being fully restored to its normal position. And, via some other complicated linkages, this also means that the total function remains disconnected from the arithmetic register. So the result of this contest of strength is that the machine simply stops working. It just takes one tiny movement of lever 286 to put everything back where it should be, and the machine will work normally again. But for the office worker in 1960, her precious Divisumma was broken. Time to send it to the men in brown coats. You can see why there were so many of them in those days.
Those readers who are following this with the service manual in hand (admittedly improbable) will have noticed that I've diverged slightly from the straight and narrow here. I've commented before on how excellent these manuals are, but in this case Homer nodded. There is no spring 601 in the manual! And lever 150 is really lever 150', and it doesn't have a lug 150a! How can this be? What I think happened is that Olivetti enhanced the original double-spacing mechanism, which was much simpler, but my manual reflects the older design. The web has a surprising number of pictures of the insides of the Divisumma 24, and they all the seem to be the same as mine. This is a problem though, because nothing describes exactly how all these extra pieces are meant to work together, so it's largely guesswork.
Now that I'd finally diagnosed the problem, what could I do about it? The apparent reason was that spring 601 was too strong compared to spring 277, so the obvious thing to do was to put a stronger spring at 277. However I didn't have any suitable springs. I sent off for a pack of 200 small springs (lots of people sell this kit but I'm pretty sure they're all the same one), but while I was waiting I thought, it doesn't actually matter whether the total is printed in red, so why not just stop lever 150 from dropping at all, ever. So with a piece of wire I fixed it to a convenient place at just the right height. That was a real mess! It turned out that the place I fixed it to also moves, and that was enough to mess things up completely. I'd broken one of the Divisumma cardinal rules, which was to forget just how incredibly inter-related everything is in this machine. Lifting lever 150 a bit too far put it in the way of something else, and almost nothing worked correctly.
When my box of springs showed up, I eagerly replaced spring 277 with something stronger. I carefully turned the machine over by hand, and as the extra cycle did its thing and lug 276m slid forward, lever 286 gracefully followed it, preventing the evil tab 150a from dropping down into its path. YES!!! Problem solved, through ingenuity and creativity. How happy I was!
Briefly. Because after that, the total stopped working again, intermittently, but differently - instead of showing all 9s, it would show some apparently random value. That was when I discovered inertia. What happens is this. When the memory read cycle is over, the extra cycle machinery gets put back into its normal position, which means among other things that lug 276m gets pushed forwards and hence lever 286 also. This should restore it to its normal position. Visually, it does. But it just doesn't go quite far enough to latch in place. This leaves it free to move forwards during a total cycle, ultimately resulting in the memory register being engaged. The actual effect of this is that each digit, as printed, is the lower of the value in the memory and the value in the register. It isn't obvious to figure this out!
This time, the problem was that spring 277 was too strong. It turns out there is a tiny gap between the two lugs 276m and 286n. With the original spring, there's enough inertia to move lever A the extra fraction of a millimeter so it engages. But the stronger spring stops this, so the machine doesn't work again, but differently.
To adjust the machine, sometimes the service manual tells you to bend the lugs. So, I thought, the next step would be to tweak the exact position of lug 286n to get things to work properly. I did, and that, I rather think, is why my Divisumma will no longer divide. But that's a story for later.
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