This is more of a hands-on passion project (as in, not code) that I believed deserved more than just a post.
And it’s about a typewriter.
If you were to ask my friends, colleagues, and close acquaintances, they would all agree on one thing: I do have a tendency to like somewhat nichey stuff.
I wouldn’t call myself a hipster, but I do like the occasional piece of media from before I was born or that very specific and little-known thing that you’d have to search on the internet to find any information about.
For example, I have been a fan of Wizardry long before Drecom brought the franchise back from its slumber with “Variants Daphne”.
Another thing I find quite enjoyable are typewriters: they are the perfect analogical combination of function, form, and overly complex engineering.
My mother has an Olivetti Lettera 32 that my grandfather frankenstein’d to hell and back. I brought it home one day and tried it out. I enjoyed writing with that typewriter, but it never felt mine.
Fast forward to December 2024, and while aimlessly wandering through a flea market in Pavia, I chance upon an Olivetti Lettera 35 just sitting on a wooden crate.
The poor thing had no cover, the ink ribbon might as well have been a piece of wood, and the space key was stuck on the chassis.
But hell, the guy sold it to me for 15EUR.
I had my own typewriter.
And a lot of frustration lying in waiting.
After bringing it back home, I quickly noticed a multiple of issues with the typewriter.
First, as mentioned earlier, the space bar was stuck on the chassis.
This was somewhat quickly fixed by taking the actual typewriter body out of the chassis, throwing away the rubber pieces that disintegrated when unscrewing the screws that enclosed it within the chassis. With some effort and patience, I was able to screw the body back in place so that it would be more aligned to the chassis. For some reason, though, it’s still not perfect, and the whole body is slightly shifted to the left.
However, now the space bar has enough clearance (about 2mm) to travel freely when pressed.
And that is when I noticed the second issues was not due to the stuck space bar: the whole typing head was stuck in place. Pressing any key would not make the letter hammers move at all.
This was quite weird to me, as I had seen people on r/typewriters (my main source of information at the time) having issues with the typing head not advancing while the hammers would hit the same spot over and over.
It took… more than I’d like to admit before I inspected the pins underneath the carriage.