The pleasures of a bunch of old typewriters
A local enthusiast s new acquisition, a battered 197x Smith-Corona Corsair Deluxe came to me for a clean-up. Showing this scrawny thing a little love was surprisingly fulfilling. I think it needed me. Jean is a local artist, art teacher, and typewriter enthusiast. She picked up this Corsair Deluxe at a thrift shop for $11.00 and [ ]
Parts in a Box Syndrome is a well-known typewriter affliction caused by a typewriter owner s fever of initial excitement, a flurry of dismantling, progressive confusion, and eventual forgetfulness. The victim of the syndrome is the typewriter which usually becomes a Parts Machine™ or Project Machine™. I know that I have about 24 hours after dismantling [ ]
The hobby of typewriter repair is generally low stress, low stakes, low danger, but every once in a while, I go a little cowboy, a little Evel Knievel and push things past comfort. It s funny how fast things can go from Whee—this is fun to Uh-oh . Several days a week, I keep an eye (more [ ]
I recently worked on a 1963 Olympia SM7, one with an affliction common in Olympias of this vintage: gummed-up mechanics due to sticky blobs of orange-ish brown goo. These orange blobs brought to mind one of my very most favorite Star Trek episodes, The Devil in the Dark from 1967. In it, the USS Enterprise [ ]
I belong to a small group of local enthusiasts who like to tinker with typewriters, and we get together occasionally to share know-how and tools. Last weekend, our group of typewriter mechanics met at a local library for a type-in and light repairing. The public event drew in the young, the old, and the curious. [ ]
I have great affection for old Underwood standards. They didn t change much over their long, long years of production because they just worked. And they continue to work 80, 100, 120 years later. Opening up an Underwood and seeing their old-fashioned guts is reassuring to this hobbyist. It s like seeing a familiar face at a [ ]
Every once in a while, I stumble across a type of typewriter that I haven t met before in person. I had never encountered an R. C. Allen until recently when I started working on a damaged 1962 R. C. Allen VisOmatic A. Everything about the machine is next-level educational. Unfamiliar typewriter brands force me to [ ]
I love a freebie. I try to curb my impulse to drag things home because there are just so many good things out there—for free. However, if the freebie is a dysfunctional typewriter, it s hard to quash the impulse. I heard this spring that Richard Polt was thinning his typewriter herd. He put a lot [ ]
Sometimes a typewriter comes to me that bears evidence that someone has poured much love and attention into it. I worked on a gorgeous 1934 Remington Portable Model 5 last week that had obviously been worked and fretted over. This is another one from Monica and Stephen s collection of sometimes dysfunctional typewriters. They had picked [ ]
A 1961 Olympia SM4 with a jammed carriage arrived on my workbench a couple weeks ago. I started calling it Murderbot. It s a long story, so I ll start at the beginning. The Olympia belongs to Monica and Stephen, a delightful pair of local typospherians who have been a veritable font of dysfunctional typewriters for me [ ]