okay! managed to make some time to mess with it, and
- think the pens aren't completely dry but rather dried out. been soaking them inside and out with some alcohol and look how great that blue came out!
- definitely will have to replace some nylon gears; losing steps frequently

refilling the pens also doesn't seem like such a difficult task after having opened them up, as long as i can find good water-based pen inks here i should be able to saturate the felt in them and flush out the ballpoint, then hopefully they'll work like new!

so i left the ballpoint tips soaking in alcohol overnight because there's still ink in the pen bodies (my stained paws are proof) but it wasn't getting up to the ballpoint tips. unfortunately not only did this not work, i ended up mechanically breaking the tip for my black pen...

... such that the ballpoint dislodged itself into the pen tip. so considering i can't recover the original pens, i ordered some 0.7mm ballpoints & i'm going to try to devise a way to make them into brand new no-old-parts plotter pens through some 3d printing. digits crossed!

on another note, the gears at first were grinding a lot when returning the carriage, then they started working smoothly, now grinding again. likely the infamous pinion gear but that's gonna have to wait until i have the time to take it all apart. gonna try 3d printing that too

as for the keyboard, it really is just a matter of dirty contacts, the more i've been using it the more i can touch-type it again. gonna try to open it up and clean once i open the machine to replace the gear as well

🤔

so i bought some inexpensive fine-tip 0.7mm ballpoint pens (in 10 different colours!) in order to try to fashion new stock for plotters like mine

the first attempt wasn't a success.. however i managed to refill one of the pens with the black ink from those ballpoints!

the backstage :^)

i still want to try making new pens from scratch later because i want ones in the other colors the ballpoint set i bought came in (like purple and pink), but for now i'm content enough in refilling the ones i have right now

also, just so it's noted i _did_ ruin three pens so far: one of them i didn't notice the ballpoint had vanished, one of them basically crumbled when i tried to take it apart, and the other one i tried a method of getting the ballpoint unstuck and it just dropped into the pen body

the ballpoints in these pens are VERY fine and the tip holding them is plastic, so they're very easy to break. the black pen i have right now is using the tip from one of the gray extra pens (supposedly "correctable" pens, but mine had weird greenish and reddish inks in them)

so after more work yesterday and more frustratingly broken pens, it doesn't look too good for restoring the original pens. i still have black and blue working ok, green sputters but looks like the ballpoint is not getting enough ink, and i have no working tips left to make a red

so the next step is to try and focus more on sourcing new pens through whatever process. there's a place you can still buy them in the US but i'm not in the US and that makes it prohibitive, unless someone wants to donate me some pens for cost of shipping

i won't have much time to work on it today, so maybe this weekend i'll take a look at the gears. those i can get from eBay for a more reasonable price than the pens (because the pens are only sold domestically), but first i'll see if i can do anything to them without replacements

golly!

d'you know what? i'm not immediately seeing any split gears, believe it or not

i think they might be grinding for another reason, like the carriage movement resisting too much