2501 Restoration - mainly working on stacker section

VACUUMED OUT THE 2501 CARD READER

I used a shop vacuum to remove the fragmented plastic gear reside, mouse hair, dust and other junk from the card reader as the first step in cleaning it up. I will follow up with 409 and Simple Green for general cleaning. There is rust on a number of non-critical parts that I will partially sand and then treat with a rust converter but not right now.

STACKER ASSEMBLY NEEDS TO BE DISASSEMBLED

The card stacker is a mechanism into which cards are ejected at the end of a read/feed operation that will hold them in a neat stack for eventual removal by the operator. The card flies up and bounces off a bumper at the top to arrest its motion, then is nudged leftward by an oscillating assembly to result in the card fitting against the prior cards in a neat stack. The stack of cards is on a slider which is spring loaded so that it moves leftwards as the stack of cards grows until it reaches a 'stacker full' microswitch that causes the reader to become not ready. 

The slider moves along a chromed rod, with a shoe fitting under guide rails and having the rod pass through a hole in the center.  A spring attached to the shoe pulls the slider rightward. The chromed rod has rust and corrosion on it, so that the slider can't easily move left or right. This will need to be treated to allow easy movement of the rod through the shoe. 

The oscillating assembly that nudges cards to the left once they fall down from the bumper is jammed. It consists of a base plastic piece with steps formed into it, plus two thin plastic pieces that move left and right in slots cut into the base piece. The thin plastic pieces are moved by a lever underneath that is oscillated by a cam on a shaft. The shaft is turned by the stacker gear that I replaced, converting rotary motion into the back and forth nudging action. The thin pieces don't move due to solidified grease and dust. 

I have to remove quite a few screws and plates to open up the stacker assembly to remove the slider rod as well as to reach the thin pieces where they are frozen in place. This is mostly done now, but I need a bit more work to uncover the front side thin piece because the card reader motor is in front of it. 

Once I clean up the rod and the thin pieces, I have to reassemble the stacker. A number of the parts have room for movement so that they can be adjusted to specific widths or relative positions. In particular, the path that the ejected card moves through, as it moves up to the bumper and falls down onto the nudging assembly, may have a target range of adjustment.

I do not have access to the IBM 2501 Field Engineering Maintenance Manual, the document in which IBM would detail all the adjustments and specifications for reassembling parts of the card reader. This worries me as I will be doing even more disassembly of the reader, with those parts also having specific adjustment targets. If anyone knows of someone with this manual, such that I could get it scanned, it would be a great help. The parts catalog and FE Theory of Operations are available online already, but not this key manual. 

I will clean the rod, then sand down any high spots and finally try a rust converter to produce a smooth enough surface for the shoe to slide over it easily. The rod has a notch in it at the right for a circlip that holds it in place in the assembly, so simply buying a replacement rod of the right diameter and length isn't enough.