Owning a so called
obsolete thing like a typewriter brings up several problems (apart from the obviuos space limitation and strange looks from other people when they find out you have a dozen of typewriters, old computers or game consoles in your home). One of them is the trouble with getting replacement parts. For example, a tooth broke off from the daisywheel of my otherwise perfect WheelWriter during shipping, and I had to purchase a whole other machine just to get an intact writing element (you can get wheels on Ebay, but I needed a Hungarian one, and that's hard to get).
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| IBM Selectric service crank |
The other one is that sometimes you need to fix them and you need proper tools even for cleaning. That's another thing I'm short of. So I made my first step towards eliminating this issue by ordering a crank from Ebay. This is just a crank, you say, and you may be right. But this is a special tool made for IBM Selectrics and it allows you to hand-cycle the mechanism of the machine. The original tool got a knob at the end, so its official name was "Hand-cycle wheel", but that one is no longer produced. So this one is a custom made product I got for $12.70 plus shipping plus a little donation for the U.S. Marine Corps which is rewarded by a pretty sticker on the envelope which I like (this is a shame since now I'll never throw it away - okay,
maybe I will. Eventually.).
I'm far from getting all the tools I need, but it's a good start, and more will follow.
