A Closer Look

The slow-motion collection diaspora continues, as the Silver-Reed travel machine is rehomed to Cynthia, one of the attendees of the recent Bay Area type-in, and keeper of the super-sparkly Smith Corona...



Here's the Silver-Reed, back in the day:



The adoption process resulted in me pulling out the travel machines in advance, as well as the three portables I still have around. In the end, only the Silver-Reed walked out the door, but I'm always pleased to pass on a machine to a new home, especially locally, since it takes out the stress of shipping.

While I had the machines out, I remembered that the Signature 100 travel machine (yet another Japanese-made model) was ribbon advance issues. Specifically, the advance wasn't -- the plastic cogs that lie underneath the ribbon spools were not advancing, though there were some suspiciously flappy-looking springs in their vicinity that may simply have come detached. It's a condition I first noticed during NaNoWriMo "auditions" back in 2012.

Here's the 100:



After I said good-bye to Cynthia and before I packed up the machines, I vowed to give the 100 a closer look. Some fiddling around with a magnifying lens and a dental pick, a little squinting, and the luck of finding a similar spring hookup nearby meant that this annoying issue was fixable in all of ten minutes. I'm not sure how permanent my "repair" may be; it may turn out that I need to bend a hook into the end of the springs to hold them in place better. But now suddenly I'm blessed with a new/old machine, back off the "injury" pile and into the "worth a second look" stack.

Space is tight in Bay Area domiciles, a fact that Cynthia and I both bemoaned. Tighter still if you have a tendency to accumulate machinery (or phones, kitchen appliances, etc.). A travel-size machine is pretty small, considering. No thicker than a dictionary, really. (This is called justification.) Maybe... maybe it's worth a second look around the house, too, to see if there's somewhere this machine could be stowed?