A portable one: Brother Deluxe 220

Firstly, welcome to my blog, glad to see you here! Since I'm in love with everything which has keys or buttons on it as long as it looks cool and/or retro enough I decided to start a blog about them.

This includes typewriters, calculators and computers. It's obvious that collecting these things are not cheap, and I'm pretty short of money recently, but still have a few gadgets I plan to show you.

So, here we are with the first: a Brother Deluxe 220 typewriter I got from an auction site last summer for a few thousand Forints. I can't recall the exact amount, but it's equivalent to $10-$20, if you prefer.

It comes with a black plastic case which converts your thing to a small suitcase when you attach it to the typewriter to allow carrying this 4 kg machine with you. The case looks pretty ugly, I'm not sure if I ever can clean it, but the machine itself was almost in perfect conditioin. And it's red!

Yesterday I took the time and cleaned the machine a little. This is how it looks like:

The typewriter after a little cleaning

Pretty neat, isn't it? There's a serial number on the back, it says J03418192:

S/N: J03418192

I'm not sure when this machine is made, but there's a sticker on it which says "10 million Brother typewriters: 1961-1980" which means it's made after 1980, so it may happen that it's younger than me :) Robert Messenger features a black Brother Deluxe 220 on his oz.Typewriter blog, which has a serial number beginning with H. However, his machine has no "10 million" sticker on it. What his machine has while mine doesn't: a label which says: "Made in Japan". I have a "Made in Japan" title inside the plastic case though, but I'm not entirely sure whether it refers to the case only or both the machine and the case.

The ribbon needs replacement

You can see the "10 million" sticker on the picture above. You may also notice that this has a Hungarian keyboard, which is perfect for me since I'm Hungarian. However, as it was common in that time: it has no 0 or 1 numbers on it. My mother had an Optima when I was little, and that also had no 0/1 numbers on it even though that was not a portable typewriter at all. Typists used small L instead of 1 since it looked pretty similar, and small O instead of 0 for the same reason. So the number 1500 would have looked like l5oo for instance.

Black/Red/None selector on the right

Because of the portable design the height of the typewriter is pretty low (around 10 cm). This means there's no place to lower the segment when pressing Shift. It lifts the whole carriage instead.

When carrying, you can lower the carriage return lever and there's a latch on the right which keeps the carriage from sliding to the right.

I'm pretty satisfied with this little beauty, however I must admit I miss my 1 and 0, not like it was a flaw or anything.

Hope to see you soon with more beautifully made gadget.