Smith-Corona manual typewriter

I'm surprised at how many typewriters I've found in the small swath of town that I patrol since I moved here. This is the third in a couple of years, and there was one other one I wasn't able to get. All the others were electrics, so I was even more surprised to see a manual.



This is very close to a typewriter I had (or had access to) as a kid. Had I thought I had a shot at cleaning it up, I would have tried, even just for the purpose of selling it off or giving it away. But this was so rusted up that it was likely beyond repair.



Since it was so rusted up, getting parts off was a pain, when they would come off at all. For instance, the first few rows of keys came off readily, but that bottom row just would not come off.



The bottom--less clean than it looks.



Taking this apart, or rather taking parts off of it, was essentially an hour or so of trying different screws, turning the typewriter around, and attacking it from a different angle. I finally quit around the point pictured.



I pulled more parts than this, but other than the buttons, I really didn't bother to save that many of them.

Brother GX-8250 electric typewriter

Remember a few weeks ago when I said I found two typewriters, but I only wrote about one? Well, now I'm finally getting around to doing an entry for the second one. For the most part, the two machines were very similar, so the breakdowns were also pretty much alike. In other words, there's not mch to say about this typewriter that I didn't say in the previous entry.

I think this is a newer model than the other one I took apart. The body has a more curved or rounded shape, i.e. it looks more modern. I could look it up to verify, but I don't care that much right now.

The ribbon cartridge. There's a few nice little pieces in there, plus I like the texture of the outer casing.

Here's the head (I guess that's the right term), with the daisy wheel and correction ribbon...

...and here it is removed from the rest of the typewriter. This one was a more complex design than the other typewriter, and it lent itself a bit more to disassembly.

The keyboard, again, very much like the other one. However, rather than remove all the keys, I decided to just leave them on the board piece, just to keep them all together. I'm just going to store this with the rest of my bulk plastic parts.

This is a decent trophy pile, I think. Lots of interestingly-shaped gears and rollers and so forth.

Brother GX-8000 electric typewriter

I find a lot of the same stuff over and over again, so it's nice to find something completely out of left field. Case in point, I found not one but two electric typewriters in a single pile a couple of weeks ago. The other one will show up in a later entry.

Funny thing is, I've taken a couple of manual typewriters apart many years ago, but I don't remember ever getting a hold of an electric until now. I wonder if this is a fluke, or if they will become more common as offices that rarely get cleaned up begin to throw out old equipment.

This thing was pretty nasty when I found it, so I had to clean it up a little before I started to tear it down. The keyboard cover served it's purpose rather well, since the keys themeselves stayed remarkably clean.

The ribbon cartridge had some cool little pieces in it, plus the outer case had a texture pattern that might make its way into some future project.

The keyboard is its own unit, unlike in a manual typewriter.

The keys are attached to the top of the unit instead of the bottom, like with computer keyboards.

Popping all those keys off was a pain in the ass.

The head or cassette or whatever it's called. Not many removable parts here.

I photographed the parts in two sections. The first group includes all the parts with the exceptions of the keys and the little post theings that held the keys in. Just these would be a fairly decent parts haul...

...but these are an added bonus. I have no idea what I'll do with most of them, and to be honest, i've purged excess identical keys from my collection of crap before to make room for less repetitive crap, but on the other hand it's nice to have a lot of redundant parts to test paints or adhesives on, or to practice with new tools. I'm not exactly a fan of Joseph Stalin, but he summed up my feelings on keyboard keys rather well when he said "Quantity has a quality all its own."