Melitta EI/16
Very, very rare is this machine, an electric Melitta, which clearly (still) has Walther EMKD DNA, but is still constructed a bit differently. The history of Melitta is long and convoluted, and excellently explained on the website of Jaap Scherphuis. The machine was found on Facebook, of all places, and the elderly lady who owned it told the story that it had been her father’s, who had been coordinating director of a school group. Why on earth a school director would need a fancy, rare electric and especially East-German calculator, no-one knows.So when I arrived home with the machine, it had a number in the setting register shifted from its true value, which luckily was very easy to rectify with the top plate off, and it would not run (some filing and cleaning of the contact points would help with that). Carefully trying with 120V made clear it was setup for 240V, and then most functions worked, but it definitely did not want to divide. Some lubrication of the linkages in the base of th emachine also fixed that. However, then after a few trial calculations, the motor would no longer stop running - and wax started pouring out of the starting capacitor, which started to feel suspiciously hot. Oops. After an episode where I read the text on the capacitor wrong and ordered 35µF capacitors, they did not help in the least. Going back to look at the original can showed that it was a 0.35µF ... Modern film capacitors turn out to be approximately a hundred times smaller than they used to be in the early 1950s! Anyway, with a brand new 0.35µF starting capacitor, the motor stops when it should and starts when it should. Here are some pictures of the machine:
And finally a video of the machine in action: