It used to belong to my grandmother. When she went blind after a stroke, they decided they'd try to teach her to type. Well, that didn't really work out so the machine ended up at my parents' place and I used to love playing on it. I wrote a bunch of kid's stuff on it.
In the dream I had, that machine was full of joy and magic. I leant over and took a big sniff of it and the smell of ink and solvents and machine oil nearly knocked me out!
So I decided this dream was trying to tell me something and I kept my eyes open for old typewriters. I came across my first one at a garage sale. It was an Underwood 310 portable made in Spain. I bought it for $12. It wasn't a great success but it certainly whet my appetite for more.
I was driving around one day and started to get that typewriter feeling, my little antennae were going twitch twitch twitch. So I pulled the car up outside an antique store -- not one of those classy french polish joints, more like a junk shop I guess.
And that's where I found my Facit T2 Standard from 1970. It was the biggest, greyest, ugliest thing I had ever seen and I wanted it bad. It had stencilled numbers on the back, 209, which made me think of ED-209 from Robocop.
I talked the guy down from $120 to $80 and felt pretty pleased with myself until I got it home and discovered the bell didn't work and there was something wrong with the mechanism that sets the margins.
I took it apart and managed to rig a fix for the problem with a bit of wire cut from a paper clip. When I got it going, I fell in love with it. It's so heavy and solid, there is no way that beast is going to slide around on the desk when you crank home another line of text. I've written nearly 100,000 words on it.
The next machine I acquired was actually given to me by someone at work who found out I was into typewriters. It's a beauty! A little Hermes 3000 portable from 1968. This baby would have been the equivalent of the iBook in its day. So now I've got a machine I can take away with me on holiday.
My 'project' machine is a Royal Standard from the 1930s that I traded for a six-pack of Coopers Sparkling Ale. It's dirty and rusty and I haven't opened it up yet to find the serial number so I'm not sure exactly what year it was made, but I think it's late 1930s. It's in pretty good mechanical shape and I'm confident I can get it working again. Sadly, it has spent many years in a hot, dusty shed, so it's never going to be restored to its former glory.
I've also just bought a 1965 Olympia SG3. (I'm able to date my typewriters accurately by their serial numbers thanks to the internet typewriter database.) It cost $150, which is the most I've spent on a typewriter but the guy I bought it from reconditions them so it's in excellent condition. The SG3 is an absolute classic. Very smooth action.
Read more about my grandmother's typewriter.
1970 Facit T2 Standard
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1970 Facit T2 Standard rear
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1968 Hermes 3000
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1930s Royal Standard
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1965 Olympia SG3
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