[HN Gopher] The last generation of typewriter repairmen (2010)
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The last generation of typewriter repairmen (2010)
Author : Tomte
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-04-23 11:12 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| unchocked wrote:
| There's an excellent typewriter repair shop in LA called Rees
| Electronics (a misnomer for this application). Fixed up a 90 year
| old typewriter for me - priceless service.
| bena wrote:
| I had one of those suitcase typewriter deals. I got rid of it in
| a move some years past. Partly because getting ribbon for it was
| next to impossible at the time and I had neither the time nor
| inclination to reink ribbon.
| dang wrote:
| One past thread here:
|
| _The Last Generation of Typewriter Repairmen (2010)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11187604 - Feb 2016 (4
| comments)
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| There's a great documentary about this subculture called
| "California Typewriter". And the book "The Typewriter Revolution"
| (as well as the accompanying website) are also great!
| underseacables wrote:
| There's a lovely shop in Manhattan called Gramercy typewriter
| repair, they do an amazing job.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I have an old Selectric in the basement that doens't work
| properly. I occasionally think about sending it off for an
| overhaul. Still the best and fastest way to neatly address an
| envelope for a one-off letter.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I bet the people over on r/typewriters could point you in the
| right direction to fix it yourself if that's something that
| might be of interest to you.
| scroot wrote:
| They've moved down the street to a great new location and last
| time I was in there, a younger person was manning the desk
| (which I took as a good sign).
| lr4444lr wrote:
| How many people bring in broken typewriters that this would pay
| Manhattan rent? Do They sell or fix anything else?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| They probably serve customers across the continental US.
| Steve44 wrote:
| Not quite typewriters, but my dad started working for Burroughs
| in the UK during the 1960s repairing their adding machines. They
| were the ones with blocks of every number and you'd press one
| digit in each column to select it and then perform the
| calculation. I don't remember those, but it was lots of levers to
| clean and adjust.
|
| He then moved onto coin counting machines, this I do remember
| quite well. They were fully mechanical with a spinning disc, not
| too dissimilar to a meat slicer, and the coins would filter off
| and pass through a channel & mechanical counter into cloth bags.
| In most machines the coins would be pre-sorted, this would be
| bagging up say 200 coins per batch. The heavy cotton bags were
| then sealed with lead crimps. These machines were fully
| mechanical, every component could be swapped out and adjusted.
| [1] looks very much like the early ones I remember, but I knew
| the electric ones. These machines were full of rubber drive belts
| and micro switches.
|
| Many things in our house were stored in those cotton bags, they
| were great and I've still got quite a few to this day. He also
| collected the used lead seals from them. Every year or so we'd
| smelt them down into lead bricks to sell for scrap. He built a
| 'blast furnace' in the garden powered by a 1950s cylinder Hoover,
| they sucked at one end and blew out the other! Image searching it
| looks similar to a ZA55 Electrolux [2].
|
| Sometime in the late 1970s the machines changed and gradually
| became electronic. They had modules you just changed, the display
| unit was about the size of an A5 folder with a row of Nixie tubes
| along one edge; I had loads of dead modules to play with as a kid
| - if only I'd have kept them!
|
| They then moved onto LED modules and with even fewer moving parts
| in the machine. It was about this time my dad retired, he was
| getting fed up with the job too. He didn't want to be the
| engineer, yes he did wear a white coat over his suit for work,
| who just changed modules. He loved the mechanical and problem
| solving aspect of his work.
|
| Slight diversion, but sometimes customers would place 'traps' for
| the engineers. He went to one place and found a coin in a place
| he knew a coin could never get to. He Araldited it back in the
| same place. When he left the owner asked "did you find any money
| in there" and my dad replied "if there was any in there, it's in
| the same place".
|
| Another tale, a toll tunnel used their system and he was called
| in because it kept jamming. He worked through the problem but
| during that found a lot of coins 'lost' under the conveyor belt
| between the toll booths and the cash room. The curios thing is,
| for years the cash collected by the toll booths had exactly
| matched the cash counted.....
|
| Sorry third one, when we had a telephone installed there should
| have been a 6-9 month waiting time, but because my dad serviced
| the machines which did the wages for a lot of companies we not
| only got one quickly, it was also on the priority repair list
| along with doctors. It was still a party line, we shared the
| phone line with the neighbour and had to press a button on the
| phone to 'claim' the line. If the office wanted to get in touch
| with him urgently, they would phone the customers they thought he
| was at that day.
|
| I was also one of the first people in the UK to spend a PS1 coin.
| Because my dad had to configure the machines he initially he had
| blanks but then had real coins. On the day they were launched he
| let me have some to spend, so I bought my breakfast at collage
| with them at about 08:30 on launch day. That was before banks
| opened so 'normal' people wouldn't have had access to them.
|
| I know I've rambled, but this triggered some memories and I
| though to add them here and hope someone enjoyed reading. I will
| add this to my "family scrapbook" as I've not thought about these
| for years.
|
| [1] https://www.catawiki.eu/l/16108097-icc-intercount-v2-bank-
| co...
|
| [2] Sorry for deep link
| https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/FgoAAOSweFJfZjmg/s-l300.jpg
| Stratoscope wrote:
| What awesome stories, thank you for sharing them!
|
| > He _Araldited_ it back in the same place. [emphasis added]
|
| For anyone like me who wondered what this meant and thought it
| might be a typo, Araldite is a brand of adhesives that I'd
| never heard of before. Maybe I'm showing my ignorance, but now
| I have a new word to use!
|
| https://www.go-araldite.com/
| shoo wrote:
| Araldite. glue. two-part epoxy. mix the resin with hardener &
| leave it to set. useful stuff.
| jvandonsel wrote:
| As someone who learned to type one one of these things, and wrote
| many college papers on them, I just have to say...
|
| Good Riddance!
| Multicomp wrote:
| I have 3 manual typewriters (a cheap brother charger, Olivetti SV
| something, and a 1920s pain-in-the-neck to use), and 3 electronic
| typewriters (Brother ML something with single line display, IBM
| ActionWriter II, IBM Wheelwriter 2000). None of them have needed
| repairs, but when they do, I'm in trouble.
|
| I constantly use the last one because its simple daisy wheel
| design and buckling spring keys that feel just like my IBM Model
| M keyboard (since the latter came from the former), but I have to
| admit it is a weighty, barely 'portable' typewriter.
|
| One of these days I'm gonna make good on my threat to reverse
| engineer just enough of the PS2 protocol to mount a raspberry pi
| zero, some sort of small screen, and some rechargeable batteries
| inside the upper case margins of this keyboard so it can be a
| buckling-spring-powered Alphasmart with SD card.
| zackbloom wrote:
| There's a good video on how PS/2 works here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aXbh9VUB3U
|
| It's pretty straight-forward. There are also pre-made kits for
| digitizing typewriters if that interests you.
| ksenzee wrote:
| Typewriter repair was our family business too. My dad opened a
| repair shop in our garage in about 1980, and at its peak he had a
| handful of employees, repairing mostly IBM Selectrics for offices
| and schools in the Seattle metro area. I would wander out there
| when I was off school and watch him working, or any of the
| employees who didn't mind me hanging around. The timing was not
| great, and the family business didn't make it even all the way to
| his retirement, let alone to the next generation, but I can still
| smell that repair shop.
| hardtke wrote:
| My single parent father was a typewriter repairman. He visited
| offices to repair them, so I spent some of my early childhood
| in the car outside of various office buildings (highly illegal
| now, of course). The exact moment it ended was when we were
| watching the 1984 Super Bowl together (this was in January
| 1985). He saw the Apple Macintosh commercial and said "uh oh"
| (paraphrasing NSFW language). He went out and bought the
| Macintosh on the very first day it was available. I set it up
| and made a document on MacWrite. Another round of "uh oh." I
| hit print and the printer spewed garbage -- all of the first
| cables were defective so the printers didn't work. After he
| went back to the store and got the working printer cable he
| decided to find a new line of work.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You can't leave me hanging! What did he end up doing?
| hardtke wrote:
| Real estate (built a few spec houses and then small scale
| landlord). His last client, BTW, was George Lucas' personal
| secretary. When she retired that was the end.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Sounds like he made a decent enough living and kept busy.
| Unless "The end" is an unhappy ending?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| How did they recover / move on?
| courtf wrote:
| A glimpse into the not-so-distant future for a lot of
| professions, programming including.
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