Epoca Hunters: I Hear You

I like to dig around in the blog settings and look for how people are finding the site (and obsessively over-analyze which posts are getting viewed.) Lately the this search phrase keeps popping up.

hermes 3000 epoca font

I do have a 3000 with that typeface, but it's suffering from lighter top-halves of letters, which I think indicates that the platen diameter has shrunk narrower than the curvature of the slug faces.

Anyhow, someone is interested in it, and maybe you want to make a computer font of it? If so, have at it. I've uploaded a scan of the characters from my machine into my Google Drive which you should feel free to fontify or ogle or pity, persons-who-are-finding-the-blog.

Typospherians: if anyone has tips for getting better letter impressions, I'm open to ideas. These were typed by running about five sheets of paper through the machine at once -- there's little improvement over past examples of the machine in use. I know about recovering the platen, and that may ultimately need to happen when budget allows, and I'm willing to stare into the madness that is the Hermes line-spacing mechanism.

Prepared with the help of my otherwise-awesome 1958 Hermes 3000

Sprouts

Typed with "Lucky" the Remington Noiseless Model Seven

Auditions: An Old Friend

I'm not even going to bother apologizing for the typos here. The only negative I'll say about the Skyriter is that it wants to skip space a bit when it's not being held level, say, when it's being used in a lap, as I did. I suspect this is also like my Royals, which want a more even typing style than I usually use on the computer.

Looks like the return issue on typer #2 is the bell tang getting caught on the right margin stop. I'll have to compare the two and see if something is out of place. This is why everyone should own two of everything!

Typed on Smith-Corona Skyriters from:

1952


1957


PDF scan of the Skyriter manual shown

Two Weeks?

Is the calendar correct? Are there only two weeks until November? Has someone been mucking around in a time machine?


(Source image from BBC)

On Being Cheap: Ribbons for Wrimos

I know that there are better sources for typewriter ribbons than my local office supply big-box store. Jay Respler has his share of business from around the Typosphere, and I've seen Baco Ribbon & Supply mentioned a few times. With my general budget-mindedness, though, I usually opt to roam the printer ribbon section at Staples. They sell 2-inch diameter plastic spools of 1/2-inch wide nylon "printer ribbon" that is meant for a dot-matrix printer. I figure that application is pretty close to that of a typewriter -- short impacts -- and for NaNoWriMo, I'm not as picky about quality.*

The above photo is the three different packaging variations I've seen over the years, from oldest on the left, to the current supply on the right. The common theme is that they are meant for a line of Okidata printers, in models 80, 82, 82A, 83, 83A, 92, 93, "and others." Also, evidently, the Xerox Phaser 3300.

The spools are nothing special, but the ribbons have the familiar grommet near the end to trip the typical portable reverse mechanism, and are drop-in replacements for many of my portables. The ribbon is all-black, and 12 yards long. They're fairly durable, and I've re-inked them with success.**

These are not the "Universal Typewriter Ribbons" which have the evil strip of flaky, useless "correcting" material on them. I avoid those like a pile of fresh rhino poo, as should you.

* I suspect the cheap ribbons are part of the reason why I have such issues with OCR, since they leave a fine dot pattern inside open letters that sometimes trips up the software. A larger issue for OCR, though, is my bad habit of backing up and over-typing my mistakes. No ribbon is going to fix that.

** Also, with ink. And WD-40. Unlike the delicate re-inking procedures I've seen other folks use, I just drip black ink into the wound-up ribbon, zap it with WD-40 to theoretically spread the ink around (it's a solvent of sorts, right?) and then let it all sit in a sealed plastic bad for a while. The end result is not bad, although sometimes you get bold blotches in your typing where you hit damp spots in the ribbon. Again, it's NaNoWriMo, so my tendency to care about this drops off noticeably.

Auditions: The Other Brother & Friends

Not a strong showing for the travel typers to say the least. I think I'm getting spoiled on the full-size machines. There's more to go, though.

In order of appearance in this typecast:

Signature 100 (Brother-made):


Hermes Baby:


Lettera 32: