While my partner would never go so far as to explicitly forbid me to take up yet another hobby, he has on several occasions pointed out the folly of adding more tools to the hoard of crafting paraphernalia littering our house. Besides, after knitting, quilting, painting, yoga and archery, what new kingdoms are left to explore?
Typewriter conversion, apparently. And all the solder, circuits and glue that go with it.
I blame Etsy for exposing me to the USB typewriter. It’s a cool, crazy idea – taking obsolete technology and re-purposing it so that you can have all the physical key-bashing joy and ka-ching! sound effects of an old machine, while keeping a sensible digital “soft copy” of your hard-printed text. I became obsessed; I had to have one.
After spending inordinate amounts of time perusing Jack Zylkin’s fabulous USBtypewriter.com website, drooling over his lovingly restored Olympias, Smith Coronas and Underwoods, I decided I could achieve maximum fun at minimum expense (ha!) by buying a machine of my own and ordering the $55 DIY kit, which involved soldering and maybe some gluing, no big deal. Why shell out $600-800 for an already-converted model, when you can build your own?
“I’m smart,” I thought to myself. “I have a Master’s degree AND a Dremel. I can do this!” I pictured a Sunday afternoon, Daft Punk playing softly on the radio, my workbench littered with a mystic array of whozits and whatzits, and in the midst of it all, a typewriter. My typewriter, modified by my own two hands. Looking innocently retro, unless you saw the cheeky wire sneaking out from beneath its aged chassis, prowling for a computer to hook up with.
Five hours, tops: from opening the mail-order package to finished product. Thus was the hubris of my original estimate of how long an Olivetti conversion should take. I was so very, very wrong.
I opened the cardboard box, and found… a plastic pouch of assorted computer bits, and some bubble-wrapped green and black sticks. Huh. Concerned that Mr. Zylkin might have forgotten something, I referred to his installation instructions (no, I did not read these BEFORE ordering the kit).
The lengthy BOM, or “Bill of materials” – yes, I had to Google that acronym, already a bad sign – included lots of electronic parts, but assumed you already had a penchant for hacking shit up and therefore owned and knew how to play with the following, not-included items: stranded wire of 24 AWG or 22 AWG (‘American wire gauge’ – yup, had to Google that, too), wire strippers, pliers, angled tweezers, tin snips, precision screwdrivers, gaffer tape, spray paint, safety glasses, a soldering iron, solder, a hot glue gun and glue, superglue, double-sided foam tape, degreaser, compressed air, a lighter, a Dremel rotary tool with a cutting disk, sandpaper, a micrometer, and a USB printer cable.
Undaunted, I went to Home Depot and The Source, and dropped some more cash.
Pause with me for a moment to do the math. I picked up two typewriters, one Olivetti 45 and one Underwood 5, for around $200 – an heir and a spare, in case I screwed up badly on the first try. Let’s not discount the time and effort it took to check that these models could be converted, hunt them down, procure them, and transit them home.
Before touching a tool, I spent an hour reading the DIY manual twice, and an hour watching YouTube videos to teach myself how to solder. Another hour painstakingly unscrewing and removing the chassis of my machine from its fragile plastic casing followed by time spent cleaning the filth of decades off of it while puzzling out where in hell the crossbar was located.
Then another hour soldering the circuit board together from its component parts, squinting, hunched over, inhaling toxic fumes, cursing quietly under my breath, and sweating about the correct placement and orientation of every capacitor, oscillator, diode and resistor (pro tip: resistor orientation doesn’t matter).
My Olivetti needed special mods because of its highly unusual up-front toothy crossbar, which had to be exposed, unhooked, given delicate steel-cutting surgery to remove a supporting rod, and then a few coats of spray paint (48-hour recommended drying time) before I could attach the sensor board and contacts; finicky work with crazy glue and tweezers. My afternoon project quickly became a week-long affair. My economical alternative to buying a pre-made model had now cost at least a dozen hours of leisure time, plus money spent on tools and the machine itself. The DIY kit is not made for the electronics dilettante, or the faint of heart, is what I’m saying.
After a few harrowing incidents, I eventually succeeded in completing the project, connected my iPad, and typed a “Hello World” message and the standard “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”. And to be dead honest with you, that was it. The work of hammering my fingers into keys and hearing the slam of the metal letters against the inked tape, paper and rubber roller wheel was cool… briefly. It quickly became obvious to me why contemporary keyboards work the way they do. The act of returning to mechanical keys was similar to trying to drive your car without power steering. Physically exhausting, slower, heavier, and not significantly more fun for anyone wanting to write creatively, as amending drafts requires a lot of shifting paper around. All work and no play makes Moira want her touch sensitive, ergonomically designed keyboard back. Despite my grumbling about the process, the act of hacking the machine itself was ultimately way more fun than operating the finished product.
