Juwel Fix
It was Wednesday who started all this.
I recently refreshed my friendship with Masz, whom I lost from my horizon after moving to another country. When catching up on our hobbies and projects I mentioned my typewriter madness and it turned out that his daughter would like to have Wednesday’s typewriter.
Who the heck is Wednesday??? As I live an isolated life in the woods - I had to catch up on latest poppis and checked that this character is indeed using a typewriter: a Juwel.
Call it a coincidence (vide Paul Auster’s books) but there actually was a Juwel on Swedish auction site. I did not plan to bid on it - it did not look anyway special to be worth adding to my collection.
But since there was a teenager girl who wanted a typewriter - my call of duty was on! I placed a bid and won with no other bids. Only that the machine would arrive just a day before I was about to travel to Poland, to meet Masz.
Backup plan was to prepare very alike Continental, to act as Wednesday machine. This was at least a certainly very good typewriter so if Masz’s daughter should “catch a bug” then this machine will definitely be a proper one.
My Juwel came an afternoon before our departure, dirty and with non-functioning backspace. I went with plan B and Continental became Wednesday machine in Masz’s home.
Juwel was put on waiting list for me to fix it.
Many months later I finally grabbed it and took care of all problems. Backspace link was missing so I made a new one. Otherwise it was mainly dirt which stopped it from working.
Once cleaned it started to work properly and needed no adjustments.
It cleaned pretty nicely, decals became visible again and so I could see that it is Juwel Fix I got in my hands.
My specimen was sold in Sweden so I’m lucky to have a qwerty keyboard.
According to Typewriter Database this is one of last machines from this line.
Typing feeling is a bit different from what I’m used to with other German machines, like Erika or Olympia. Key stroke is deeper but keys stay horizontal all the time so it is by no means uncomfortable.
It is snappy but not as stiff as Olympias. Due to longer key stroke I cannot say it is as snappy as Erika but it is very pleasant to type. I would compare it with Urania, given these two to chose I would go with Juwel.
I got intrigued by this pleasant typing action so I did some research on Internet. Not much information there, Richard Polt has a good article about Juwel Rapid which was interesting as my machine is quite different in details!
But the typing action - I found another resource, an excellent review with in-depth analysis of type bar action which is responsible for this typing-feeling. That got me really on toes - it is that which makes this machine so unique!
Well worth watching this video, deep-dive in engineering indeed!
Back to my machine - it is a pure typer without unnecessary gimmicks.
There is no ribbon color selector (who uses that today anyway? I mean - really?).
There is no right margin. Well, that’s disputable but as long as one uses standard size paper - like A4 in Europe - we need only a bell to warn us that the line is ending. Like on Blickensderfer 5 - a bell rings: prepare to advance to new line. No need to press Margin Release to finish a word, you just move on. Thoughts keep flowing down your fingers, no more distractions than strictly necessary.
In short - I don’t mind not having a right margin.No Tabulator. Well, I use Tab when I write letters so that’s a useful feature but it’s easy to live without it.
Other than that the machine has all what’s needed to comfortably type.
Ribbon reverse is automatic - if you have rivets (or knots) on your ribbon.
One can also manually reverse ribbon by pressing a small button on either side of the machine.
Line release (but with line memory) lever is on the left side of the carriage, together with 1 line and 1.5 line spacing control.
At the bottom of left side carriage end there is a red tab - carriage lock.
Right side features paper release lever (which also rises paper bale) and carriage release.
Car hood-type ribbon cover - so you will never lose it. Woody Allen should have this machine!
One other interesting feature is that the machine is carriage TILT. Like Hermes Baby / Rocket. Which means that shifting action is very light and smooth - and very simple to adjust.
Simplicity must have been a word they kept in mind while designing this machine. All is accessible and not cluttered like on Remingtons or Erikas. Yet the machine is very compact and lightweight!
Shift-lock is also far from fancy. Just a metal tab, with slot holes for adjustment. On my specimen this tab got very used so someone had to pinch it, to extend it due to usage.
A clear sign that the machine was used a lot - and yet it is still in very good mechanical and cosmetic condition.
On the back one can see left margin rail and end-of-line bell construction. It cannot be simpler!
So there we have it - very modest but utterly interesting machine from a small and relatively unknown German manufacturer.
I’m not a touch-typist but watching Haelscheir's Haven fast typing on such machine clearly shows that they are indeed capable, small machines.
Which is contradictory to some opinions on the Web who state that these are not capable of doing the job. Well, I tend to think that it is these mechanics who cannot tune them properly and instead blame Juwel engineers for not designing them properly.
It cannot be further from the truth. These are very decent, special-feel machines, very worth having in one’s arsenal.