Thoughts on 3D printing a typewriter.

It has been a while since I've addressed the question of 3D printing typewriter components. As I've so far been the only person to really attempt to tackle it, whenever the topic seems to arise in forums naturally I'll end up getting an email or a message on the subject. 

So I think it is time to discuss the current limitations, as well as what is actually possible. But to do so I'm going to have to take you through some basic engineering and design principals to explain these limitations. 

For those who don't know, during one of my many lives I did a course that gave me a certification that was known as a 'COS in Engineering'. It was an intense 6 month course that effectively crammed 2 years worth of technical training that you would get progressively while doing an apprenticeship. Most of my contemporaries went on to become toolmakers and engineers. I however went on to become a theatrical stage manager after studying Theatre Technology. 

I guess you do what you are passionate about. Anyway, that was another life really. 

So I popped out of the other end of this course having done training in machining, technical measuring and quality control, drafting and planning and CNC programming amongst other things. I was always excellent at the theory and the intellectually complicated work. But was crap when it came to the manual machining stuff. So they pushed my study in the direction of looking at a new field in engineering:- Computer Aided Design and Drafting. 

I was fortunate. I got advanced out of some of my workshop modules and instead ended up being placed with several senior engineers with Toyota who were receiving specialised training on CADD. Back then the workshop engineers didn't think much of this CADD stuff, but it was clearly the direction of the future of manufacturing at the time. And getting a grounding in it is important for those who want to use this kind of 3D technology to produce refined and quality parts. 

Problem 1: Tolerance. 

No, I'm not about to lecture you on peace and good will to all man. But rather about a problem that has faced engineers for hundreds of years. Our current work tools are incredibly accurate. But are only accurate to a point. So when parts are made by engineers, they need to specify how accurately the part needs to be made. 

Basically, it is a way of saying that you want the part to be a specific size, but you can allow it to be made a certain size bigger or smaller for it to still be able to work a specified. 

If a tolerance is 'tight' it means you have very little room to move on the specification. Loose tolerances tend to be wider and less accurate. 

For example: The ball bearings on the Royal 10's carriage rail is exactly 5 millimetres wide. This would be specified as 5.00mm on the plan. However, the tolerance would be about 0.1 of a millimetre, which means that the ball bearings could be made between 4.9mm and 5.1mm in size and still be considered acceptable. 

Most of the components made for typewriters after about 1930 however were to much more exacting tolerances. So you would often have a play of much less in size - say, 0.05 of a millimetre. 

Think about it. That's thinner than most people's hair. We're talking incredibly accurate sizing that was made by guys using non computer guided tools. 

The problem with 3D printing however, is that the technology is currently limited to an accuracy of over 0.2mm. So while this is incredibly small, it isn't small enough to get the results needed for the really refined parts of the typewriter. Specifically the moving parts that rub, shift and slide against each other. 

However, this can be overcome, but requires handing of the parts with some sophisticated hardware afterwards. When I made the handle (displayed above) for the Remington Noiseless, it had to be drilled out post print. This was the only way possible of getting the accurate finish required for the part to work. Other 3D printed parts - if done carefully, could potentially be further machined to produce the accuracy needed. 

Problem 2: Design. 

We are unfortunately in a position where every part that we wish to manufacture requires a considerable amount of reverse engineering. The part may look simple when you look at it, but often there's grooves and intricacies that were machined into it that we often mistake as being ornate. Those grooves are there for a reason that often isn't obvious.

The big problem is getting accurate measurements. To do this there's a plethora of tools that are used. These tools need to be able to measure up to a 100th of a millimetre (some of them a thousandth) and as such they are expensive, and require training on how to use them to get a good result, without damaging them. 

The tool displayed in the middle there is a Micrometer, and it is the most accurate of the three displayed here. I used such a tool to get the measurements for the Remington part, and that took me about an hour to get about 12 sizes. And that was off a part that was incomplete, and needed some guessing. 

Curved surfaces are difficult. Threads are relatively easy (you use a thread gauge or tap set to check) complex shapes are..... f***ing hard. Wonder why I haven't popped out a replacement escapement block for the Royal 1 yet? It is a complex shape that would have been easier to design onto the machine already knowing all the angles and measurements required, than it is to measure out afterwards. It is really hard work to get the right measurements that are within tolerance. 

How about measuring up this guy.

And then there's the gears. 

A gear might just look like a disk with teeth, but oh my... there's a hell of a lot of measurements involved. 

There are engineers that specialise in designing and manufacturing gears. I don't know if I can emphasise enough how hard gears are. 

At the moment 3D scanning technology is in its infancy. The tolerances on it's scanned information are about the same as what the 3D printer outputs. So as you could imagine, a combination of the two could blow your tolerances out by a huge amount - rendering the effort pointless. 

There however is a very simple way to bypass this whole process:- work off the original drafts. 

The patent drafts don't usually contain enough information, but the original drafts for each and every part must exist somewhere. Somewhere..... Anyone got a basement full of designs? 

Problem 3: Materials.

The 'stainless steel' that I constructed that Remington part out of is strong. But it is what we would call a 'hard' material. What this means is that the material - while strong, is likely to be brittle when stressed and simply crack and crumble when put to its limits. This is a different definition to hardness than what we are talking about when we are looking at platens. There, we are actually talking 'more or less tough'. 

A tough material isn't brittle and has give, and flexes instead of just simply breaking. Plastics are tough. Even metals are more tough than hard - depending on how they have been treated. 

A typewriter needs both kinds of materials. However, at this stage 3D printing produces only 1 when it comes to metals - hard materials. 

But 3D printing isn't the only weapon we have at out disposal. CNC milling, lathing, shaping and cutting tools are also available to produce objects out of other materials. These methods are also far more accurate and able to cater for our more refined manufacturing needs. But they have a disadvantage - they aren't actually all that flexible. 3D printers are able to produce complex shapes easily. But CNC gear requires a cutting tool's route (the part that shapes the metal) to be planned carefully. This makes machining these parts a lot more time consuming and expensive. But once done, you can produce hundreds of thousands of identical parts. Which is exactly what this kind of technology is typically used for - mass production of highly accurate components. 

A 3D printer however does some pretty good work with making tough plastics. Even your home based 3D printer can make some great plastics. But because of the layering technique used to print a part, it tends to produce an interesting texture to the item's surface. As such this isn't exactly ideal - especially when you need the surface to be smooth for smooth operation. 

But then we have the problem of type-bars. 

Image from oztypewriter.com

Type-bars are unique in engineering. They have complex shapes (the gears and the slightly turned type-head) that require a lot of accuracy. But they also have an unusual metal structure. At different points on the bar the metal goes from tough to hard. For example: The head that the type stub is soldered onto is hard. This is done by heating that section till it is glowing hot, then cooling it very rapidly. 

The middle of the type-bar is typically forged. This is effectively a tough section of metal that is pressed under sudden and immense pressure - this compresses the metal's atomic structure closer together so that it is even more rigid. This makes extremely tough, while being very hard as well. 

Around the gear at the other end of the type-bar needs to be tough. It has to be flexible enough to handle the bounce and the whip as the head hits the platen, but it also needs to be machined very smoothly so that it doesn't break down over time with friction with enough hardness to resist wear. 

In short: There isn't a machine in existence that will produce a product quickly and easily to replace a type-bar. But with a fair bit of post machining and handling you can get close. Sadly, you won't be able to forge anything easily. 

So is it possible to make a typewriter? 

Not including the potential hundreds of hours of work required to measure up and design the parts in CADD software which could be useful in the future - the answer is 'No'.

Well... sort of. Actually, there is a typewriter design that could potentially be a great candidate for 3D printing with a lot of work. But it will require assembling the parts afterwards and a lot of adjustment.

What is this typewriter you may ask? 

Photo - Oztypewriter. 

The (not so) humble Blickensderfer. Anyone up for taking on a 'Project Blickensderfer' to see how far we can get? 

There's other issues involved, and really I have only glossed over the issues that I have discussed. There is a whole lot more involved that may need a fair bit of discussion. But all in time. It is about to hit midnight here, and my eyes are drooping. 

'Night. 

January Newsflash

Hot off the press news from Platen HQ. 

New to the Junkyard....

Type-in, and type-in workshop news.  

A QWERTY Blick 8. Speaking of 8.....

One more thing...

Mmmmm diamonds. Made in 1922.  

Just playing a small part with small parts.

Time to crack out the Remington 5 for a bit. And as it is such a nice day, the front deck will be perfect.

The box.

About a month ago Ms Jane and I popped by her mother's house after we both finished work. Joy (her mother's name) had called and said that her partner, Andrew, had something that he wanted to give me that would need a bit of explaining.

Andrew had previously worked for a little company called 'IBM'. You may have heard of it. He was a call-out serviceman. 

It was during this period of Andrew's working life that he and Joy first met and forged a friendship that has lasted several decades. In the most recent couple of years they have grown quite close to each other, and now have a strong relationship. 

We arrived a Joy's place at about the time that most civil people would have been doing the dishes after dinner. My work clothes smelled of hospital, and I'm sure my face looked like it had been sprayed with Domestos. I was tired.

Joy was just settling in for the evening in her slippers and comfortable clothes, but Andrew had only recently gotten home from work himself and was quite bright and chirpy. Actually, he seemed quite excited.

We talked a little about the kind of day we'd all had, and then Andrew disappeard out the back door of the house, and downstairs to a cupboard under the house. He returned with a dusty old box that had originally carried canned fruit sometime in the 80's, but now hosted a collection of much more interest.

When Andrew began working at IBM, their biggest product was the Selectric II/III typewriters. They also were in the process of rolling out their wheelwriters, and variable type wheelwriters. While I sat there, both Andrew and Joy fondly spoke about these variable type machines, and the typewriters of their era. Andrew himself had a few interesting stories to tell  of his days of servicing these machines. 

Andrew settled into a glass of red wine, and started to tell me about what all of the parts inside the box where. As we talked, he would often excitedly go off on another tangent with stories of his work life with IBM, and it was a fascinating and interesting conversation.

Inside of the box were parts and tools from when IBM's typewriters were king. There were ribbons (likely dried out now) tools, cleaning swabs, parts and even a parts guide. And to my amazement, these weren't just parts stripped from a broken down machine. These were new and unused parts.

IBM selectric III 'Golf ball', still in original retail plastic.

Not 'just' any parts. But this collection of components covered some quite crucial pieces - including complete shaft assemblies for several different types of machines, and more importantly - a complete IBM  'Through-kit'; a kit that contained commonly replaced parts, that you would just automatically use to refurbish a machine.

 A complete and unused shaft, still in its plastic.

Part of the 'through-kit', with a few extras thrown in. 

Andrew suggested that I could use these parts to trade and swap for parts with other typewriter enthusiasts. He knew that I had a couple of Selectrics, and knew that the variable type wheelwriters are rather hard to find in Australia.

But I had other ideas. The implications of such a collective of parts to me were huge. Sure, I could just swap these and have a couple of machines going. But then again, these were unused and unground parts. In the hands of someone with enough engineering knowledge and CADD skill, along with the right tools, this was a nearly priceless collection of reference parts. Parts that could be reversed engineered, modeled digitally, and potentially used to produce many more parts via the more modern 3D printing and prototyping technology that is available today.

Because these parts are unworn, they present the possibility of being able to take far more accurate measurements that could produce better end products. It will take a lot of hard work though. 

Ms Jane replaced the old box with a new one the moment we got home, as the old box barely survived the trip in the car without spilling its contents everywhere.

While we were at Joy's house, Joy decided to bring out hew own typewriter to show me. It was a marvelous Imperial Model 6, which has sat in her cupboard for several decades quite neglected. 

The metallic blue/green of the machine was actually quite eye-catching, and in person quite attractive. The machine has quite a collective of daily use muck in it, and a bit of plasticizer seepage on two keys. 

With a bit of work, I think this Imperial beauty has real potential to come up looking near new, and I look forward to taking the time to service and clean up a machine that means something to a family member.

There is also something of a family story attached to this machine. Joy has owned this typewriter since it was bought new for her by her Aunty, and has probably typed all kinds of wonderful things over the years. 

I think it is a thing of beauty, and it's great that she's kept it. 

I'm really excited about the box of parts, and it was great to talk to Joy and Andrew about their stories of using and fixing these typewriters. 

Thanks guys! 

The seductive allure of my Valentine.

Pardon my miss-use of 'your' below :-

 

It may seem twee to be writing about my Valentine typewriter on Valentine's day, but then again my disdain for my Valentine has been rather well documented.  

So it may surprise a few people that I revisited the Valentine, which hiding at the back of my collection, and found myself being both frustrated, and then seduced by this machine. 

*  *  *

It all started late last year on Facebook. Or more accurately, with a friend from my past. 

This friend had been seeking me out on Facebook, but I wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with them. With a click of the block button they were gone - out of my life, and I expected them to be out of my mind forever.

But they weren't out of my mind. The situation bugged me for days, and after a little while I decided that it was time to write to them, and express my frustrations and hurt and ask them not try to contact me again.

So, I rolled out my Valentine. I had mixed feelings of anger and sadness, and the Valentine seemed to be the right keyboard to take it out on. Before long I had paper loaded into the machine, and I was bashing out a note to my now rather ex friend.

The Valentine however, didn't survive the length of the letter. Its scratchy carriage continued to grind and moan at every press of the key, and the escapement occasionally jammed and condensed letters together to form a blob of words. 

By the second page, the machine gave up the ghost. One of the bearings that I had painfully re-inserted 6 months ago shot out of the carriage unexpectedly mid travel. But I continued to type on the machine with the carriage wobbling around in a rickety motion until the letter was done.

I finished the letter and pushed it into an envelope. The next day I grabbed all of my outgoing mail, and headed to my nearest Australia Post mailbox. But before I did, I left the letter typed on the Valentine behind on my desk.

I was now left with a wounded Valentine. After I'd previously re-assembled the carriage I had never been happy with the action of the machine, and I just had a feeling that it wasn't trustworthy and that feeling proved to be right. 

I mulled over the mechanism and I couldn't quite figure out what had happened. It seemed physically impossible for the machine to dump a bearing mid movement, and I couldn't see any signs to tell me what had actually happened. The best I could figure out was that bearings may have been worn down, or that the retainer had jammed in the middle of the movement - forcing the bearings to jam and push out the side of the retainer and shoot out of the typewriter.

Obviously this was going to need the bearings to be once again re-inserted. But I just didn't have the heart to do it again, so I tucked the Valentine back into my cupboard until I had the patience and the mindset to do so. 

*  *  *

A somewhat casual auction. Much more relaxed than ebay.

 In January I flicked through a catalog  for an antiques auction over in Woolloongabba and spotted an interesting Art Deco table that had been poorly photographed, but showed some real potential. I popped down on the day of the auction, and discovered quite a beautiful table. 

While the auction progressed I picked through the bits in the store-room for a couple of hours until the table come up for auction. I bid - and won - a stunning 1930's dining table for a whopping $30. It would have been $20, but a dealer put in a half-arsed $5 bid against my first bid, just to see if he could score it cheap. I'd budgeted for significantly more than $30 for this table, which was pretty obvious to the dealer after I countered his bid within seconds, and he dropped out out of the running as he wasn't really interested.

Furniture wasn't really selling that day, and most of the dealers that were there were looking for little things that could be sold at markets or along with other items in their stock. Oddly several sets of antique bottle openers sold for more than the table did. Jewelery seemed to be the hot item, while my table was the only table to sell for the day.

While I was digging around the storage room, I discovered an Olivetti Dora buried in a job lot. The machine worked brilliantly, but was in a horrible state. The case was water-damaged, and some of the plastic had fused to the plastic of the Dora's Shell - staining it yellow and making it appear as though it had been burned. Also along with the typewriter in the job-lot was a marvelous label maker.

I bid, and before long I was the excited owner of a Dora and a label maker with about 20 fresh rolls of tape for a bank-breaking $10.

I grabbed that, and a few other trinkets that I'd bought, loaded up Ruby the Exxy and headed for home. 

*   *   *

 When I bought the Dora, I have other ideas than adding it to my collection. I could have spent hours fruitlessly trying to do something to the shell of the Dora to make it look nice again, or.... I could just use it as a parts machine. When I got it home and typed on it a little I was surprised by how well it worked. It was actually quite a nice typewriter. So I reconsidered my course of action for a moment, but then just through to myself - 'the world isn't going to miss one ugly Dora', and I promptly started to deconstruct the machine's shell. 

From a mechanical point of view, this Dora was pretty good. However, it had been filled with silt and muck - most likely from being stored in someone's leaky shed, and was most going to need a lot of cleaning. Frankly, I couldn't be bothered scrubbing the whole thing out. I flipped the machine over, and after dropping out no more than 8 bolts and two springs, I pushed some levers aside and I had the part I needed. 

 There can be only one! (swings sword).

I speak of course, of the entire carriage. Not just the rails, not just the platen, not just the paper table etc. But the entire array.

I spoke to John on the phone about what I was doing. Speaking from his experienced Olivetti typewriter mechanic point of view, his comment was blunt: "Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread".

John was right, of course. I had no idea of the complexities involved with relocating an entire carriage into a new machine. But I sure didn't have any intention of putting myself through the grief of relocating the bearings again - particularly as there was clearly something very wrong with them.

But the job turned out to be quite simple. I ripped the Valentine's carriage out, and plonked the Dora's back into place quite quickly. I even gave everything a scrub along with a grease and oil change while I was at it, so all the important bits were well looked after and running very smoothly. it all seemed to be such a simple repair. I flipped it over, and before shoving the shell back on, I gave it a test run.

Of course, nothing worked. 

Okay... so... where do I start fixing this.

So, I flipped the machine over gain and loosened the bolts, screws and bits and pieces. Progressively things sort of worked as I fiddled with them, but adjusting things in one direction seemed to put something else out. So soon it got to the point where it occurred to me that the entire carriage array must need some kind complicated adjustment procedure performed to ensure that everything lined up correctly.

After a little bit of thinking, I thought I had come up with an idea on how to do this complicated adjustment procedure. I flipped over the machine and loosened off the 6 bolts retaining the carriage array to the side, then pressed down hard on the carriage while re-tightening the bolts with retaining this compressed state.

Aaaaaaaaaaand......

The Valentine worked perfectly.

Well, except for a couple of things that I had 'adjusted' earlier, which I had to screw back to where they originally had been.

I quickly bolted everything back together, chucked in the new ribbon that I had been using previously in the machine (I use a mostly dry ribbon while testing repairs) and give it a bit of a burl.

And you know what? After being serviced, cleaned and adjusted to death, this carriage would have to be the smoothest moving carriage I have ever found on an Olivetti. And I mean... this was SMOOTH. The plastic shell of the case which reverberated bumps and grinds previously, was now astonishingly quiet. Only my Hermes 3000 machines are smoother and quieter.

This was an outcome that was completely unexpected. So I quickly pushed in a few fresh pages of letterhead paper, and turned out a couple of long overdue letters to a couple of members of the typosphere.


And you know what? I actually quite enjoyed my time with my Valentine. There's some aspects to this machine that are a bit unrefined, but largely I found this typewriter to be a very competent typewriter. It isn't the pinnacle of typewriter engineering, but it was a surprisingly comfortable, quiet and stylish machine to use.

I'm not in love. Oh no.

But this is one Valentine that I'd be happy to go a round with twice a day, and three times on Sunday. (my overseas readers may not quite catch onto what I'm saying there).

*   *   *

The letter that I typed before I repaired the machine still hasn't been posted. It sits in a box - maybe for life. I may find a moment to burn it and let go of the memories of a long passed toxic friendship. In the meantime, I've gained an appreciation for a beautiful Valentine.

P.S. I used the shift keys from the Dora - which were the more modern Lettera 32 square style, to replace the missing shift key. I also replaced the non missing shift key as well, so everything matched up.

Rushed post - Coming attractions!

My shirt was filthy. It was my 'working on my car' shirt after all. There were dots of sweat all over it, and prints of my hands where I had wiped my palms on my hips.

"You'll be looking for Scott" I said to the man walking down the driveway in a friendly and welcoming tone. He didn't even look up at me, while he read the name on the package in his hand.
"I'm looking for a Scott" he replied to me, clearly having ignored what I said. This was a man that was very no-bullshit, who just wanted to get a package delivered.

I rolled my eyes behind my sunglasses, before I pushed those glasses up into my unkempt mop of sweat soaked hair. "That'd be me" I replied to him, using the same dry pitch that he'd just spoken to me.

He scanned the barcode and got my signature on the screen of his machine, before turning away and heading back to his van.

I knew what the package was. The back of my car was open, and the delivery man just left the package  sitting just inside the tailgate of my car before he walked away. I saw the name of the company emblazoned across the top of the package, and I suddenly started to get excited. So I snapped a shot of the driver heading back to his van for the sake of illustration in my blog, and then finished what I had been doing under my car. 

*  *   *

About a month ago I was trying to find a solution to a problem that I had with a typer I had just bought.  I wrote down a few ideas, and then set about researching a couple of them. From that research this was born:

Any ideas on what this is? And.... for what typewriter?

I was too excited when this arrived. It is a prototype, and I'm hoping that it represents a tiny tip of what might be possible in the future with our ageing typewriters. I don't want to spoil it just yet, but there's a tale to be told. The typewriter insurgency might just be about to discover that the future isn't as grim for their machines as they first thought.

I'm currently doing some inspections on my car before I hurtle myself across the Great Divide and into the desert. When I'm back, hopefully I'll be able to get to work on using this piece, and tell you why I think it is so special.