RetroTech Office

I have just finished designing and prototyping a set of replacement keys for vintage Smith Corona portable typewriters. These will fit most plastic keyed Smith Corona typewriters. These are round, flat topped 3D printed keys with embossed lettering. These will be $50 dollars a set for anyone interested. Lettering can be painted to color of your choice for an extra fee. Color is black, but I can see about getting more colors if requested. Due to variations in keyboard layouts over time a photo of the keyboard is requested. It currently takes about a day to print a set.

And here we have another episode of Fringe and an Olympia SM9 in the background.

This Hermes 3000 was seen recently in an episode of Fringe. Season 4, Episode 5.

Just found an old Dauphin DTR-1 handheld Windows 3.1 computer. Not a typewriter, but I think, being over 20 years old, it does fit the theme of this page. Will post pictures if I get it up and running. Need a power cord for it. Here is an article on it. http://www.oldcomputers.net/dauphin-dtr-1.html

Ok, well it has been so long since I was able to work on this that Facebook decided to delete everything. A little pissed about that. But down to business at hand. Just had a dream about a brand new typewriter that I stumbled across in a Wal-mart, no that's not right it was Sam's Club. Unfortunately this was entirely a dream (or perhaps this is not a bad thing as I will explain. First of all in the dream I was taken completely by surprise by this find. The typewriter wa...s bargain priced at $249 and it was way up on the top shelf. It was a very flat machine and had a black and red plastic body reminiscent of the Valentine. It was really shaped nothing like this famous typer, but it was what would have been called high design at the time the Valentine made. This was a three bank machine, meaning there were only three rows of keys, in the standard QWERTY layout. It had an oval removable ribbon cover. This was red and the lower body was black except for the bottom edge. The endcaps on the platen were also red. Under the ribbon cover was where things got strange. The segment assembly was divided into three sections. One off to the right, one slightly lower to allow clearance located off center to the right and one to the far left leaving a large gap in the center left position. This was to make room for the escapement. The three bank design meant there were fewer typebars to worry about. While the segment assembly looked strange, it actually worked very well. My OCD mind, never missing an opportunity to come up with even the most minute details, even designed a totally new escapement. But don't get too excited. This design was, to be honest, crap. There was a vertical, toothed cylinder that controlled the advancement of the platen. As you struck a key, a flat toothed arm held against the rear of the cylinder would rotate the cylinder to the left. When the arm reached the limit of travel to the left a little cam would a) lift the arm from the cylinder and b) hold the cylinder in place. The arm would then snap back to the right. But the small diameter of the cylinder meant that the limit of the arm's travel was only about 4 keystrokes. And the cam did not lift the arm far enough away from the cylinder to keep it from hanging up. So every fourth keystroke was usually accompanied by a smack to the side to settle the arm back in place on the cylinder. While I would love to see some new typewriters become available, I really don't want to see anything like this on the market. See more