Strippers and Power Tools

Among the many other things I did over the holiday weekend (bleeding into a bag, idling in an auto showroom) I broke out the tools and an old bottle of chemical stripper, and of course, the camera. Here's a few in-progress shots of the KMart 100 being silver-surferized...


Step 1 is always get the shell off. I'm still considering the idea of a paint job, so I went ahead and pulled the platen off, too: my first-ever removal. Finding the little set screws was the challenge, and hopefully they'll tighten down more easily than they loosened. Also, the knobs had to be removed to remove the small metal panels on either side of the carriage.


A peep down the inside of the platen. The silver ends of the platen reflected light coming in from the outside. Is this a kaleidotyposcope?


And bloop into the bath goes the guts. This removed a good deal of gunk from the works, though I still needed to brush out the typefaces (which made more mess later.) Next time: brush out the typefaces first.


The shell is the next thing to get some careful attention while the innards dried in the sun. I peeled out the foam soundproofing from the bottom and sides, which reeked of old cigarettes, despite a day or two airing on my back porch. In a moment of questionable judgment, I spray-painted the grimy, yellowed knobs with some red dye leftover from the Pimpwriter.


Careful use of a knife and a hair dryer to soften the glue, and the badges came off with a small amount of coaxing. I'll flatten them again with a rolling pin before re-applying.


This was the part that took (and is taking) the longest. I used a wire brush on a drill to buff the paint off the outsides of the panels, after they had some ancient paint stripper brushed on. There's no going back now.


Only after I had spent too much time trying to steady these pieces against a spinning drill (and often missing) did it dawn on me that I have a palm sander in the garage. That made much shorter work of the big, flat areas, but I still need to do some obvious touch-ups. All the main surfaces are done, though. Now I have to clean it up, and maybe try a finer grit on the palm sander to polish the metal. I haven't decided yet.

I do know that I don't have the patience to do all the interior surfaces. Chances are I'll just dress those up with some new felt or sticky-back foam from the craft store. Stay tuned!

• On acquiring the machine
• The "before" photos

Stickers of the Dead

From the original receipt found with my church-bazaar find, a late-model Olivetti 32. Purchased for $99.50 in October 1975 (not including sales tax.) An online inflation calculator makes this $420.20 in 2011 dollars, or about the cost of a budget laptop. 2247 Market in San Francisco is currently Lime Restaurant.



Adhered to the front of a Smith-Corona Sterling, this fine badge from Key Typewriter in Sunnyvale, down in the heart of Silicon Valley. No search engine matches for this business, but the telephone number uses a three-digit exchange, which probably dates it from at least the 1960s.



This is inside the case lid of the same Sterling. Presumably when Key went the way of the buggy-whip, Century Business stepped in and got the previous owner's, um, business. Century is still around.



My favorite one by far, stuck to the side of my big Royal standard machine. I'm not sure if Berkeley Office Equipment morphed into Berkeley Typewriter or California Typewriter, or was a third business entirely. With a major University just down the street, there would have been a demand for administrative machines and student machines alike.

Old Type Forged Anew

(typos left in for true fake-typecast authenticity)

• Making the Spencerian typeface
• Georg's other fonts
• Richard Polt's font page

Eagle-eyed viewers of the Typosphere page may note that the header is now done with one of Richard's fonts (Byron Mark II)

I'd be thrilled to contribute what few typefaces I have to a project like this: I don't know how much trouble it is to convert a scan into a face, but I have some faces -- even mundane ones -- that I'm fond of, like the rounded Roman letters of my SM-9, and the face on my Smith-Corona Sterling that has little half-serifs on its lowercase "n" And of course, I think the letters of the script Lettera are worth preserving... and aligning, which is easy on the digital side.

Richard... Georg... are you up for some scanning?

Silver Streak

I Feel the Need

...the need to paint. Must be the sudden burst of Spring in the air, but I'm looking for another victim-typewriter to doll up, after seeing Duffy's marvelous job on his big honkin' Royal and seeing the "Twolympia" (an SM9-in-a-SM3 body) on the Portable Typewriters group. I spotted a modern Royal Safari III the other day featuring the same yellowed-with-age plastic body style as the Pimpwriter. I passed it up, but I'm starting to think that maybe I need to take spray-can in hand and do another one up...

Also, I'm itching to try the "sheep dip" method of cleaning out a typewriter, namely, dunking/flushing the whole thing in warm soapy water and then drying it out, versus all the meticulous brushing and digging and picking that I normally do for machines. I think I'd like to try it on a beater first, before soaking a more vintage machine.

Hmmm. And it had a thick felt typing pad and everything... hmmmm!

Post-Thrift Update:

Or maybe not. I gave the Royal a hands-on try, and a more careful looking-over. Mechanically, it was fine, but the ribbon cover panel was completely MIA, so... not worth it. Although it did jog my memory about the Remington Premier that I have around:



This one could certainly use a deep-cleaning, and it's that all-plastic body that loves to be painted. I'm looking into paint color choices now.

Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush have a Baby, on the Head of a Pin

You can keep your hot-tub-based time travel. There's only two forms of time-travel I find acceptable -- a big blue Police Box and thrift stores. Still high on yesterday's unexpected ink-acquisition (nobody expects the French ink-acquisition) I made the usual trek out and about. It was a good day.

First, a Hermes Baby, something I've been watching for for some time. I've really taken a shine to travel-sized typewriters, and I think I'm slimming down the bigger, bulkier members of my collection to get a little more focus on these ultra-portable machines. I like the compactness, and the Baby is very compact. So much so that I hardly recognized it in its tiny case, sitting on the shelf. I've managed a dusting and need to work the keys a bit but I can already tell this is a slick little portable, and destined to be an on-the-lap machine come November. This is a 1943 model, with smooth (not crinkle) paint, with a cool "marbling" effect I've never seen on a typewriter before. And of course, those excellent flip-up ribbon covers.



And an overall shot:



Trying to keep my composure on the way to the checkout line, I peeked down into the display case and saw a tattered baggie with these inside:



Fogies in the audience may recognize this as three boxes of 126 film (for bigger-style Instamatic cameras) and three pouches of 110 film (for the skinnier "pocket instamatic.") I owe thanks to whatever local hoarder had the good sense to go to K-Mart, um, over thirty years ago and then promptly forget about this film in the back of the drawer. And then again twenty-five years ago, and again five years later. The film may be completely shot, but the plastic cartridges are what's valuable to me. You may remember that my very first camera was an Instamatic, as I suppose was true of many people my generation. Flawed though it was, the film-in-a-cartridge format was simple for small hands to use, nearly impossible to ruin (at worst, you would expose one frame), and cheap and plentiful, at least during the Carter/Reagan/Bush I eras. Now it can serve as a lightproof housing for 35mm film, thanks to various hacks posted online.

Even more exciting for me, though, is the sudden rush of memory I got when handling these boxes. Sometime around thirty plus years or so ago, when that first box of film was sitting unbought on a California K-Mart shelf, I was standing in the middle of our dusty country road with my dad, working on my first-ever pinhole camera, which consisted of a simple box rubber-banded to the front of a 126 cartridge. Pretty much this one, in fact, even down to using a nickel to wind it. This was an experiment in a science-kit-of-the-month-club that we had joined, and I remember standing out in the road, trying to get a picture of our little pre-fab next to the empty dirt lot, right on the other side of the City Limit line. If I close my eyes, I can hear the cicadas thrumming in the tall weeds in the ditch behind me, my elbow resting for balance on the plastic newspaper-mailbox attached to our regular mailbox so I wouldn't topple back into the murky water. I'm pretty sure I'm wearing Keds with orange reflective dots on the heels.

As I recall, the pictures were a disappointment to me, caused, no doubt, by our less-than-tiny tinfoil pinhole board, and the shaky, unsteady hand of an under-ten photographer who was used used to the great gravelly wind-wind-click rhythm of his high-tech Instamatic. This isn't photography! Well, maybe not. But it's a solid memory, and now I'm rushing back to it in my own time machine.

World Pinhole Day is coming up near the end of the month. I'll be forty then, and some of this film nearly so. I think it might be time to break out the rubber bands and a nickel, find a mailbox someplace to lean against, and pin down a new memory or two.

The Big Wrap-Up

The Manual Typewrite[r] Ideal, Rebuttal

• 'The Manual Typewriter ideal,' or why Linda Holmes thinks you are a moron (at Strikethru.net)

Unexpected

Oh Brother, I'm Gonna Dye

I passed on this one at first, but after very little convincing, it came home in the end, as I'm sure you knew it would. But now, there's a twist.

Inspired by Alpha-Smartie Vance Fry, I'm going to try my hand at giving this old Brother a makeover. You can sort of tell from my photo: some of that yellow is the color scheme and some... well, some is not. It could be tobacco, or age, or a combination of both.

I considered trying my hand at mixing up a batch of Retr0Bright to bleach the colors back into newness, but honestly, I have no desire to do this. That yellow... that brown... it's time for it to go.

There's not a lot of color choices available in off-the-shelf vinyl dyes -- I could also choose black, beige, or a buffed silver -- but looking at those red keys got me thinking that this little machine wants more than a life of blah. So, red it shall be. Take a good long look, because that color scheme is going to dye.

• My discussion topic on flickr's AlphaSmart group
  

Her Own Dictionary

Needs New Ribbon

Also needs:

• Dust and eraser bits blown out from insides
• Surface grime wiped off
• De-pooping (case only, luckily)
• De-hairing (typewriter only, unfortunately)
  
• Paper holder bent back into shape
• Rust spots removed from case lining (OxiClean?)
  
• Zipper re-sewn on side of case
• Its story discovered and written

The Speegle Curse

I need someone to blame, after all. After she sort-of badmouthed the Olivetti line, Strikethru found herself in possession of one and renounced her ways. And secretly I might have been smirking at Mr. Speegle's lavish affection for la signore and the attention she garners when he takes her out in public. And now it's my turn for a comeuppance, as this little script (yes, script) Lettera 32 followed me home from lunch. The clerk and I looked the case and typewriter over for a price tag lurking somewhere under the cobwebs and hair (?) and bird scat (!) with no luck, so she finally just said:

"I don't know... how does $5 sound to you?"

It sounds lovely, thanks.

This is another mostly-metal machine, not the plastic Underwood/Olivetti machines that I've bought and passed along. I think this one will be a keeper. No photos yet, for she and I are both ashamed of her condition right now. She's got the heart of a poet, though, I can feel it. This little gal didn't sit under a dust cover and type casserole recipes before she was cased up and forgotten. I think she's got a Significant Story lurking inside. And she's blue, like so many of my other machines... I think I may have an accidental collection "theme" going now.

Update: I meant Lettera 32, not 22.

Punching on the Edge

The punch I talked about earlier just came in, and I'm thrilled. It's exactly what I was hoping for: something to make a neat, V-shaped notch in the edge of my homemade edge-punched cards:

The red overlay shows the sizes of the punches I've tried and how much paper they remove. The first one was too big. The second one was too small. But the third one? Just right. Zsa Zsa, my Studio 44 is home this weekend for a touch of case repair, so she helped me type up cards for the remaining ideas that I'd jotted down over vacation. I was concerned about running the perforated edge down into the works of a typewriter -- visions of the line of holes being chewed up -- but I needn't have worried: Zsa Zsa offered a gentle touch and was most well-mannered.



The saga:

• The original post about index-card plotting
• And then, "Hey, it works"
• Followed by trying to improve it by using edge-punched cards
  

Big Value, Small Package

Sorry for the half-letters. This is the ribbon found with the machine, and the vibrator and some of the keys still require some de-gunking. I'd also like to note that the iPhone comes with no user-serviceable parts.

Call me Lucky

The Twofer

I've become much happier since deciding that I'm really a sucker for pity-case typewriters, especially ones that would be hopelessly bent and maimed by the hands of bored children in tow behind their mothers at the thrift store. I'm providing a service here, honest!

Sounds Wonderful

Right now, stop what you're doing and listen. Hear anything?

If you're at home, you're probably surrounded by various neighborhood sounds. The springtime sounds in my suburb are made by the swarms of lawn-care crews running ungodly leaf blowers, chasing invisible clippings into adjoining yards for their service to clean up. (Does no one besides me mow their own grass these days?) If you're in an office, you've likely got the drone of some air-moving machinery, a slight hum from your computer and the light fixtures, and maybe some traffic noise if you're lucky enough to be placed near a window. What's it sound like by you, right now?

Personally, I can't handle silence. I need something happening in the background to work, and at least since college, that "something" has been music, supplied then by hauling my Walkman and a couple of cassettes down to an isolated study carrel, and now by CDs piped through my computer's speakers. Even having the volume down low is better than no sounds at all. And I've added a thrift-store travel alarm clock to the mix -- mechanical, of course -- just for the steady tick-tick-tick it makes in the background. I need this noise, to keep me grounded in the real world. Coding datbases is a solitary, silent existense, and I guess I need a little reminder where I really am when my head is full of tables and queries and joins.

There's a discussion going now on one of the mailing lists about musical typewriters: not typewriters that make music, but that are designed for printing it onto the page. Maybe what I need here is my own typewriter music -- a regular click-tap-click of a machine being put through its paces, measuring and marking off ideas like this little clock measures off the seconds. Sounds wonderful to me. Anyone up for sitting nearby and providing me with a little mechano-musical accompanyment? The pay's not great, but the audience is rapt.

Touchstone, albatross, or punchline?

Wow, sorry about that sudden bleakness at the end. I've a birthday coming up, and I think that I'm beginning to feel it, despite my protests that I'm not. Here's that first typecast, by the way. My speed and accuracy have improved, although I still rush this old machine more than it wants to be rushed.

Style over substance

I like to think of our little group of retro-nuts as loving conservators of bygone technology, and not, as my wife would put it, junk collectors. I suspect she thinks worse things, too, when I bring home another little suitcase-sized treasure or battered old camera case. I've been pretty good lately, limiting my purchases and staying away from the eeevil temptations of the flea-bay, even passing over some reasonably priced deals within the comfortable-driving-distance of Craigslist. I've been good, really, and in general have made good choices. Look, but don't touch. Thou shalt not covert thy neighbor's typer, and all that.

And then it showed up on the Goodwill site. Not the typewriter pictured, in fact, but a nasty 70's-yellow Royal Charger with very minor cosmetic damage. I told myself I would not bid on it, did not need it, have plenty of Royals anyway, etc.. You know the drill. I bid on it anyway, a reasonable bid that kept to my informal "under $25" rule for impulse buys. I was sniped out of a win, somewhat predictably, and that was that. Lesson learned, no harm, no foul. But no little suitcase to bring home.

Except I wasn't. I was pretty peeved, actually, more than I had a right to be. Something about that awful mustard machine called to me, despite it being well outside the era of machines that I prefer -- by that time, I think only Olympia was really turning out serious portables. And yet the envy burned in my heart. So I allowed myself the consolation bid for this Corsair Deluxe, a.k.a. a very late model Skyriter. This from the time when Smith-Corona was in their last gasps, shifting operations overseas, and then across Asia -- this particular example was made in Singapore, which I think may make it from the mid 1980's.

It's not a great machine, although the Skyriter is not the ideal typing experience to begin with. It's an OK typer, and requires those smallish Skyriter spools, which means inky fingers. But it's curved, and tiny, and aqua, for goodness sake -- a close match to Norma Jean -- and despite all I'd read about this model on the portable typewriters group... I bid anyway. And won. And don't regret the decision, really (it was very inexpensive, even with cross-country shipping.) But now I've opened the door to buying these things purely on style, and not substance. I'm not trying to build a collection or a legacy, I'm just picking up machines as they appeal to me and interest me. But I feel like I've cheated, somehow: I've let down the others.

I think I need to go hug my machines.