Original Odhner type 6
An Odhner with quick clearing butterflies on both ends, that only necessitate half a turn backwards for clearing the registers. Otherwise identical to a type 7. It came with a cover, but I am not too sure whether that was original or home made. The clearing mechanism had some issues, but was duly repaired.
Then I bought another "Odhner 6" in a lot in an auction in Sweden. When it arrived with all the machines broken because of ridiculously inadequate packaging (some auction houses ...seriously!), I applied to the insurance of the auction house, and got a lot of my money back. The whole carriage movement system was toast though. This "other" Odhner 6 was in the lot too (but was not the reason I bought it), and only when I put it next to the one I already had to see whether I could transfer some of the much better conserved platework, it struck me that something was odd. Can you figure it out ?
If you did, good, if not, here are the machines side by side:
You can see that the "normal" Odhner 6 has no tens' carry on the revolution counter, and has the small round windows with numbers that turn red on a negative turn. The "new" machine was not like that - this machine had a manual direction switch on the top cover, tens' carry in the revolution register, and the larger windows, because only ten numbers needed to fit on the numeral rolls. So this machine has some features of the Odhner Nr. 8, only did the Odhner 8 not come with quick clearing, and this one does. Since it is a machine with the features of both the Odhner 6 and 8, I'd like to call it an Odhner 7, but that would be awfully confusing, because the Model 7 is the standard machine without tens' carry or quick clearing. I could go for 6+8, hence Odhner 14, but that too is taken. The only satisfactory solution is, as it is a cross of the Odhner 6 and 8, to call it the Odhner 48 (i.e. 6x8), or perhaps, as suggested by a reader, Odhner 6.8, which is very close to 7 ... but I'll settle for 8b, just like the only other example that can be found on Rechnerlexikon, serial nr. 86092 - so they were made for quite a while, as this is 68075. Strange, no ?