Restoring a 1956 Friden STW 10 Mechanical Calculator
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 พ.ย. 2014
- The Friden STW 10 is a wonderful, fully automatic, mechanical calculator, that can add, subtract, multiply and divide very large numbers. It is large, very fast and noisy, quite impressive when it gets going. This is one of the most difficult mechanical restoration I have gone through to date. This machine is complex and not modular at all. Everything is connected and interlocked to everything else. It is very difficult to take apart, and even more difficult to put back together. This particular 1950's machine, although in great cosmetic condition, was in terrible mechanical shape. It had several dozen hard stuck parts, a similar number of sluggish ones, and a few critical mis-adjustments. I cut out many of the restoration details, but this is still a 27 minute video that chronicles several weeks of work! But in the end I got everything to work again...
Friden Calculator Playlist: • Friden STW 10 Mechanic...
I scanned and uploaded the documentation I recovered here:
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Hi Marc, I'm restoring my FRIDEN STW-10 like yours; your video has been so useful, thanks. Do you have any kind o documentation, manual, etc that I can use?
[Update] The service manuals have been scanned and are now available on my website! www.curiousmarc.com/mechanical/friden-stw-10-mechnical-calculator
@@CuriousMarc Unfortunately www.officemachinemanuals.com seems to be offline. Do you know where it went? different url?
I was told the guy died, and with him went his manuals. I am going have to scan the copy I have and put it online, when I get the courage (it’s a lot of pages)
@@CuriousMarc I would love to get a copy once you scan it. I have the same model and it would get stuck while dividing, but eventually work loose. It finally got stuck semi-permanently. I have been afraid to attack it, but your video gives me hope!
@@mightyorb8637 I scanned the manuals and made them available here: www.curiousmarc.com/mechanical/friden-stw-10-mechnical-calculator . Good luck!
I used to work on those.
I had 10 or 11 months factory training on them in Rochester NY in 1967
They gave us a hand crank so I could un jam them. The hand crank was the first option. Many times the motor was slowed down a bit to help the old machines run better.
Taking the machine as far apart was much later in the trouble shooting procedure.
They were a lot of fun to work on. Meeting the people who used them was nice too.
In 1974 I made $5 per hour with a company car.
Thanks
Wow you must be incredibly skilled and intelligent to work on these complex machines. That must have been pretty good pay back then. According to inflation thats nearly 80k per year today!
+Dennis WIlliam: I recently got a replica of the hand crank you describe. Very handy tool indeed!
I am sitting here in Awe just thinking about how many hours the person(s) spent at a drafting board designing this thing. and then the many hours of machining all those cams,gears and levers. WOW! this was ingenious for back in the day.
Seconded! Where would you even start when designing one of these machines. They must've had brilliant minds. An explanation of the theory of operation would be very interesting indeed!
Simon Tay that's true
looks like an updated version of an Enigma machine, a famous encryption machine used by the Germans during WWII to transmit coded messages. 👌
Yeah, makes me feel incredibly stupid lol
My grandfather (Carl Friden) invented this machine and it is fascinating to see the guts working, and heart-warming to see a Friden treated with so much TLC. Thank you for sharing!
Your grandfather was a mechanical genious!
My dad was a VP of engineering at Friden when they were starting to transition into electronic calculators. According to him one of the prestige positions in the factory was "parts bender". Very seldom did one of these machines work right off the assembly line. The parts bender would go in a tweak the pieces to make them work.
@@BCSJRR Interesting. Your dad sounds like an impressive man!
@@BCSJRR Wow. Carl Friden too was a refugee of sorts who took a ship to the US with almost nothing in his pockets and pitched his calculator idea on the trip and was hired as an engineer. His story is amazing...like your father's (who sounds like Friden/singer should have funded but Carl was gone by then).
@@chfr927 Carl Friden was obviously a genius at mechanical design. I made my living as a sw engineer for 30 years and made some big complicated programs, but never in a 1000 years do I think I could have designed, built, and got these mechanical wonders to work!
I just amazed by how geniuses the inventor is
A mechanical masterpiece that does look better without any covers.👍😎
Fascinating machine hats off to whoever even thought of it let alone designed it and built it
I used to teach techs at rochester n.y. and at san leadro cal, and was the product specialist on the 1217,I ,am currently restoring a stw 8, I curretly have a service manual to use, I am 88 years of age so my memory is still fuzzy in all the mechanics, I am impressed with your skills Marc.
I'm awestruck that you were able to reverse engineer and fix this machine, very impressive work.
That is by far the most complicated looking machine I have ever seen. Great job fixing that up! I admire your level of repair skill!
I would have to add level of Patience and tenacity
just commenting because of your profile pic
My grandpa worked for Friden, there was also a version that extracted square root. He may have some documentation. I know he sold his RSR and Ec-132 Fridens
I'd be terrified to take this apart. bravo
Do R/C! i mean it was already broken nothing to lose 😂 hahaha
Im tempted to buy one of these and 3d scan EVERYTHING, put it in CAD, and see if I can get a metal 3d printer and make a brand new one.
Idk, its a random idea but this thing is SICK and I'd love to keep them alive. They get rarer by the year and in worse condition so I think it'd be cool to make one that'll also last for years and is easily repairable.
I'm fairly young, like, 17 (I was 9 when this video came out) and I'd LOVE to apply nowadays tech to keep this alive.
Idk, random idea that I think would be cool and I guess it could be a cool project for those who want to build one and learn how complex something was that we take for granted in this day and age.
We have the simplicity of just opening an app that's almost always pre-installed on our devices that only take a couple hundred words to write. Tbf our phones are ridiculously complex but we also take that for granted but so long as the tech companies do that all we do is type words on an electrically controlled typewriter lmao.
If you see this I'd love feedback on this idea. Maybe if you figured anything else new about it or find a listing for the ones that have the square root function I'd love to invest and learn!
(Sorry for the essay lol these things just interest me.)
Thank you! I found one of these at a good price. It is sitting in my basement waiting for a vacation so I can work on it. your video will help me a lot in repairing it.
Good luck! Hope yours is not nearly as bad as mine. The service manuals that I have acquired since then are now available on my web site: www.curiousmarc.com/mechanical/friden-stw-10-mechnical-calculator
Your patience is astonishing.
It's dizzying to think that this was designed not with cad but by hand. And manufactured by hand.
I though old VCR's were complex, this is a whole new level for me! Amazing that men could create something like this without computers. Just mind blowing.
I recently bought a Friden STW 10 (1951 vintage) and have been trying to get it running. Unfortunately, I've found that there isn't much on the net that deals with solving specific problems with these machines. Your video is a very important resource. Thank you for making it.
BTW, the "root by fives" method, which you demonstrate, works because
N
5N² = Σ (10j - 5) for j=1, 2, 3, ... N
j=1
Which is a re-statement of "the sum of the first N odd integers is N squared."
That is so true, almost nothing out there. I had to go on fumes. I found a terse disassembly manual on the Fridenites Yahoo Group (too late to help anyhow), and a bad scan of the nearly incomprehensible STW Service Manual which I had to buy on scribd.com. Thanks for the formula, makes perfect sense.
You're a hero. This is is a fabulous and mesmerizing machine. A true testament to a time before semi-conductor computers!
Thanks for showing this machine to us. I am truly, honestly, amazed by the intricate mechanisms in it. You're quite a skilled technician and have amazing patience to restore it. Mad respect!
You have a marvelous touch and intuition! Great work restoring a machine that built in the long-lost days when things were made repairable and could last practically forever.
In the shop we had a tank of Tri Chlor with some light oil added.
We would dip the machines to wash out dirt and old oil. Some machine really needed that.
Machines in dusty abrasive enviroments would wear out fast.
Acid fumes also did the springs in too.
+Dennis William: You must mean Trichlorethylene as the solvent, not Tri Chlor as the pool chlorinating chemical. Thanks for the tip. I used alcohol to dissolve the old oil, but this might be better.
Trichlorethylene, Trichlorethane Is what I meant and is no longer sold. Cancer causing I think.
Or maybe the Ozone layer? I don't remember.
Alcohol is safer for sure.
Thanks
The vid sure brought back memories.
Love this stuff! Thank you for taking the time to take us on this journey with you.
1966.68 I used one - in my first job as a trainee in a factory office in England.
I remember they were generally reliable, but as co. wasSwiss, it was properly serviced.
occasionally the carriage would jam. we users removed it, to reset cogs affected.
if you like these type of mechs, recommend you search 'techmoan 'akai invertomatic cassette'. like steam trains(I rode on a few of those too!). things wren's necessarily simpler back then.
but things worked, and you could see how they worked, not invisible digits :) well done
I have two of these machines. One has a jam and increments endlessly. The other I just got, but I have not examined it or attempted to operate it or power it on yet. Absolute marvels of engineering, and a vast mountain of a task to take on... I commend your troubleshooting and repair skills!
What an amazing piece of engineering! Brilliant! And I really like how you went in and, lever by lever, figured out how it all works.
What an amasing piece of mechanic....
U did a good job fixing it, thanks for taking the time to make the video and upload it
i went to school in san leandro at the friden factory.. when we graduated they gave us a gold plated crank so as to cycle the machine slowly and repair it.. the first thing we did, when in the field, was to send it into the shop to be washed.. in a diswasher type of machine which would rinse it with solvent and a small amount of oil.. we had specialized tools for forming (bending) those levers and such to get it to operate correctly.. the entire machine depends on cams and levers being cammed up at just the correct speed so another loever could catch it and finish a particular operation.. i serviced the calculators at all the big insurance companies downtown san francisco.. liberty mutual on pine street and the zellerbach building on market acrossfrom the shell building if memory is correct.. the first thing the guy in the video should do is wash that machine then oil and grease the cams.. it also depends on spring tension being correct.. gosh, all this was in the late '50's like 1959 or 1960.. just before friden developed their first electronic calculator.. if he getrs it running, dividing and not jamming he will deserve a medal.. :-)
Fantastic video. You are a very brave man taking that apart!
That is so complicated, well done!
What an amazing piece of machinery
Insane!!! I bought one . Its on the way from France. I'll restore it. It's the most lovely, lovely machine ever made. It makes me cry and laugh at the same time.
how did you proceed? success?
The people who designed this equipment are amazing
Wooowww... your dedication on restoring this machine was amazing!
And also amazing was that this machine actually worked after wiggling and bending the parts... talk about survivability! :D
Fantastic videos about this very interesting mechanical marvel. And it's awesome that you posted all those PDFs. A job like this is way above my pay grade, but it's so cool that it's out there for those who are inclined to be able to save more of these.
This video made me time warp back to the 80's when I had a short stint working for Burrough's Corp. They wanted me to learn how to fix their mechanical banking machines (wish I could remember the name of them) Instead I worked on the electro-mechcanical TR-??? banking teller terminals. What a pain. The days of RS-232.
I have to give you credit, dealing with all of the screws, springs, actuators UGH. I wish you well, keep tinkering.
I used RS-232 on a daily basis until 2016, for configuring and servicing SAN/NAS units. It's still popular :)
great work, you're like me, good ability to take complicated things apart and figure them out, and put them back together working. many can take something apart, fewer can put it back together. :)
antique lubrication, one hell of a double edged sword, its one of the best preservatives ever made, but its absolute hell to get it unstuck and moving again later on
Thanks for this GREAT video ..
My dad had some Fridens. He also worked on Teletypes. For the latter, every few years he'd completely spray down the insides and then carefully re-oil it. Watching you trying to find individual stuck levers made me think that might have been a good plan for fixing this one.
I went to school for this calculator in 1964 in San Leandro CA. at the factory where they were made and repaired them for several years.
Thanks for the comment! If you are still local and have any documentation (or recollections about the machine), I'd love to meet you. Send me a private message.
What an amazing video. Considering there's no owners manual so everything had to be taken apart & by process of elimination, it was fixed! When I was 10 years old I took apart an old mechanical clock and put it back together successfully. But this puts shame to that achievement, lol. Thumbs up CuriousMarc! :)
I know why you made this into vlog.
because how else is a person to remember where what goes!
You are my new hero!
I bought yesterday a FRIDEN STW-8. I will first clean it completely!
Good luck! I uploaded the documentation I recovered on my website here: www.curiousmarc.com/mechanical/friden-stw-10-mechnical-calculator
4:24 that looks like an awesome shirt!
The main shaft has a threaded hole on the right side. Find a bolt that fits and make a hand crank.
This will be a big help.
You might find a factory service manual on the STW 10.
今天我也修复了一台同样的机器，花了4个月的时间修复，好辛苦
Damn, i'm a mechanic myself, but you sir.. you're a fucking genius
Worked in a typewriter repair shop in the late eighties doing board level repairs. The old school techs (didn't like electronics, or me) doing the real work around a common bench used a submersible parts washer. Something you might consider?
Might I ask how you managed to remove the multiplication keybord? I found the two hex screws on top in and to the right of the keyboard and the four big circular head screws on the bottom of it but I was unable to get at the final screw as it was blocked by some unknown control bar. I also accidentally popped some springs off getting at the first 5 screws so now I really need to get in there lol.
Would you be inclined to design a clear acrylic case for it... so that it protects it from dust etc but still shows off the lovely mechanics?
I like this idea!
+JG: I agree! Looks more amazing without the covers! Some early mechanical calculators had glass panels so you could see the inside mechanism, too bad that was later mostly abandoned.
Awesome..
Thanks for a really great video. It is helping me to get my STW 10 working. Not having a lot of progress thus far, the main shaft is immovable and the motor just buzzes like yours initially did. So far I've completely restored 4 Monroe calculators to working order. Two LA5-160's, a LA5-200, and a CSAE 10 Monroe matic. Is there a reason why you didn't use WD40 to help free up stuck mechanisms that took you days or weeks to find and then use oil and other strong lubricants to the entire mechanicsm.
In this case I /did/ have to use WD-40. And some amount of force. I recently did another one and I had to hammer parts out of their shafts! So it seems to be a consistent Friden problem. Happens on black anodized shafts apparently. The problem with WD-40 is long term: if you don't or can't remove it, it tends to turn oil into a sticky substance. But I would not have been able to take things apart or loosened up safely without it.
Wow... This is intelligence
Congrats and thanks for posting, these are beautiful old machines. This makes me want to try again on a much less clean one that I got several years ago. Could you recommend any sources for that power cord? Also what type of oil/lubricant did you use?
Also I have heard there is a fiber gear that’s important not to put power on with the machine frozen, lest it get stripped. Any guidance on that? Can you point out where it is in your video?
This guy has the cords - I need to buy one too. Look for the oval cords:
www.apexjr.com/
I used lots of WD-40 to get things unstuck - which did its job but is a terrible substance long term. It is the very opposite of a lubricant, it's an aggressive solvent. You want to try to remove it all and re-lubricate later with light sewing machine oil.
The plastic/fiber gear is the orange looking power transmitting gear(s) on the right side of the machine. My machine was frozen and it didn't get stripped...
CuriousMarc Many thanks for the info! I hear you re: the WD-40 - I used that several years back and later put the STW aside without cleaning it off, and that was a bad move!... Some things I unstuck then are stuck again now - it definitely leaves a sticky residue. Thanks again for the video and inspiration on this.
Good trouble shooting. Most excellent.
9:35 is very neat!
I was wondering how you removed what looks like rivets without damaging the machine. I have found a machine on eBay that is absolutely wrecked (looks like it took a long fall and landed dead center on the bottom on a table corner or something so the case is bent inwards along with some of the bottom parts and transformer assembly) so I’m working on rebuilding it in CAD to allow for new spare parts to be manufactured based off of it. Also I was thinking of making a second one with modern considerations like piling pads, aluminum parts with steel rims, lightening of pieces, etc. unfortunately I don’t think the original machine will survive the process
I saw this weird plug it uses a few times here in Europe. In Germany, older people just call it the "flatiron plug". That's where you typically find it... old flatirons, sewing machines, etc.
this is complicated and interesing machine
And then came the transistor that put an end to mechanical computers. Computers have come a long way in less than 100 years. What could these humans do in the next 100?
Imagine what the world would be like without the transistor. We would have some very interesting analog modern steampunk machienes.
Mind-blowing 💥
Once the space race ended, nothing extraordinary or shocking has happened so far...
I'm in Aw....well done
Just bought one of these on ebay, and it seems to have a very similar problem, with the two left-most actuators under the keyboard being stuck. The work continues.
For posterity, the carrieage is much easier to remove by removing the travel stop on the left side, leaving the guide rails in place. you can then slide the whole carriage off to the right.
I have one of these, and it seems like it's stuck in a calculation... it just keep incrementing by one... forever...
I'd love to fix it, but I'm so afraid I'd never get it back together again if I mess with it! O_o
They are BEAUTIFUL machines though!
Yes, right here: th-cam.com/video/7Kd3R_RlXgc/w-d-xo.html
The real calculation for pi would be:
4atan(1)
Which gives 3.1415926535...
Or the approximation of it to the highest precision of the device used to calculate it.
you know there are 1 euro calculators in the shop :P its a beauty
Were should I look for these if I want to restore one?
dude you have balls
I still cannot depress the ADD or Subtract keys. The Keyboard Lock lever does not move. Could it be this lever that is causing my problems?
I have two of these machines and both have the dog clutch stuck . I have no idea how to access it . I have never seen anything like this before. How did they design this in 1950 ?
One thing is not totally clear to me, was anything stuck in the machine?
would sticking it in a tub of oil/diesel work? or too many parts that wont like an oil bath? tho not much help if parts are mis aligned.
Maybe, if you removed the motor and electrical parts. I think that's what they used to do for regular maintenance on some machines. Using detergent spray had also been suggested. But I doubt it would have worked in this case. This was stuck way to hard. I had to use enormous amount of force to barely move some parts, infiltrate with WD40 at targeted points, and really remove and clean the parts where you could. What might have worked is a warm ultrasonic solvent bath, but an ultrasonic bath this large would be a very expensive machine.
Ernie Jorgenson passed away a few months ago and officemachinemanuals.com is now a chinese placeholder. Do you know where an FR22 manual you mentioned in comments could be found now? I just obtained an STW that is not fully locked up, but stuck in subtraction and carriage not moving. I found the first service manual on scribd. Thanks for this video, huge help.
Oh, no! The manual he sent me recently even had a little note from him. His was the only place I knew of. Might be high time to scan these manuals and put them on bitsavers.
@@CuriousMarc Please do! That manual is impossible to find. The only part of it available online is a poor quality scan of the "disassembly" section on the old Friden Yahoo Group.
Just stick the entire calculator into a gigantic ultrasonic cleaner and run it for an hour.
What type of lubricant and cleaner do you use?
For cleaner I recommend Simple Green, and for oil Nye 140B
Minions tshirt rocks!
This was the iPhone X of the 1950's
Hi Marc,
I just recently purchased this from a seller on E-Bay, but it didn't come with a plug, I was wondering if you could tell me if it's a standard 110? I know this video is nine years old, but looking it up on-line doesn't seem to produce many results so far. Thank you in advance
That’s an oval 110V cord, a standard from the 1050s. They are getting hard to find, but they are on eBay, often for ludicrous prices. Many people replace the old oval plug with the modern squarish one.
@@CuriousMarc thanks for your response!
Also does this computer have an FPU (antecedant to CPU)? Sorry - I asked about 'differences' - meant differential equations. lol
I don't quite understand the question. An FPU is a much later specialized term referring to electronic circuitry for accelerating floating points calculations in an electronic computer. A floating point number being a number described by two numbers, a mantissa and an exponent. I do not know of any mechanical calculator that represents numbers natively that way. But you are probably asking instead if one can do floating point calculations on a machine like this. And the answer is yes, you sure can do such calculations, just like a CPU with no FPU does floating point calculations using integer arithmetic, just a bit cumbersome. However in practice, and with so many digits available (that's why they are there!), you'd simply perform fixed point calculations. The Friden has many manually operated markers to keep track of the decimal point on all registers and on the main keyboard just for that purpose. I think I show this in my Friden demo video here: th-cam.com/video/qKm9eM2BuM0/w-d-xo.html .
It was a great video, but please invest in a camera tripod
I know, I know, I get dizzy just looking at this :-)
With the entire thing basically being moving parts I think I would have sprayed the whole thing down with a light oil and let it sit for a week.
I'd have given it a good squirt of WD40!
I would not keep unplugging it but put a switch in the line!
What would Babage say?
You seem to be a genius, and I feel awkward giving you advice but the constant camera movement is making this somewhat difficult to watch. I'm fascinated but am also getting dizzy.
Yeah I know it’s pretty bad, I’m getting sick myself watching the wobbly video. I have gotten a little bit better since. But then, no always…
anyone know of a more complicated machine than this?
My other question is; can this machine be used for polynomial calculations / finite differences? I only ask since the British Science museum have reconstructed Babbage's difference engine from the 1830's. If so can you pls upload a video - that would be amazing!
btw - here's the link on YT to prove it;
th-cam.com/video/BlbQsKpq3Ak/w-d-xo.html
(skip to about 18mins into it)
The Babbage Finite Difference machine (of which I have a video of the one that was at the CHM here: th-cam.com/video/GB1xQkgi3HE/w-d-xo.html) is the only specialized finite difference mechanical calculator I know of. It would be possible but impractical to use this method using a mechanical calculator like this - you'd have to use lots of machines and operators and coordinate a calculation. To compute mathematical tables with this, you'd simply use polynomial approximations instead, since it can multiply and divide.
Please make your videos in higher resolution !
How much WD40 did you use?
I think he probably used some lube or oil mostly. WD40 cleans rust, lube (acts like a solvent) and frees stuck mechanical parts, you can't use it as a lubricant
Jose is correct on all points. Stay away from WD40 if you can, and remove it and replace by oil if you have to use it.
Yup, you should use WD40 ONLY to clean. After you put some of the cleaner, it will evaporate (That's why you shouldn't use it as a lubricant) and then you should use some oil to lubricate the moving parts.
Also, NEVER use WD40 to "lubricate" motors of any kind (A very common mistake by a lot of people)
It sounds like it is running too fast to me
Stuck
The magnificence and durability of German Engineering.
No German engineering here... Made in San Leandro, California, by a Carl Friden, a Swedish immigrant. That said, it is built like a tank!
Don't you just miss that 1950s quality.
Yes I do!
Jeffrey314159 Old Gemma engineer seems like they were designed to survive a nuclear explosion.
Just HOW does one set about designing such a machine?
Obviously a lot of repetitive parts and actions, but nevertheless.
My brain hurts
ebike motor wasserdicht
my math frends say thats stw 10 is forbindin
NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN