MKE typewriter

This megadoodle by yours truly appears on the cover of the new QWERTY Quarterly, the official publication of QWERTYFEST MKE. (The decal on the paper table represents the Milwaukee Art Museum.) It should be available soon on Etsy.

 

Parting with parts

I don't even remember where they all came from: these mutilated, disabled writing machines loaded onto my basement shelves. Some were donated, some came from thrift stores, some seem to have been generated spontaneously. 

Often they've provided a useful part here, another there. But the sheer tonnage has been weighing on my mind as well as on my shelves.

Half-functional remnants of once gorgeous typewriters ...

Machines built in the '20s, rebuilt in the '40s, de-built in the 2010s ...

Now-inoperative carcasses of once productive office machines ...

Some might become functional with some elbow grease (and literal grease) ...

Melancholy machines dreaming of long-gone touch ...

To the rescue: Trevor and Becca Brumfield of TB Writers Plus!

They came by this morning and filled their pickup to the brim.

Destination: Dayton, where they're running a typewriter repair business the right way and planning for the long term. 

My parts machines will continue to help writers write, bringing their twentieth-century technology into a twenty-first century that sorely needs it. Bon voyage!

The ROKR wooden typewriter: a closer look

In April I posted about the wooden typewriter from Chinese model kit company ROKR. Easily believing Rokr's prominent warning that this is "NOT A TYPING TOOL," I took it to be a charming, though arguably somewhat kitschy, tribute to typewriters rather than an actual writing machine.

It turns out that the warning on Rokr's ad is overly cautious. Their typewriter does type!

Their website is less modest:

Assemble a real working typewriter you can actually use, complete with moving keys, a rolling carriage, an ink ribbon, and that familiar ding at the end of each line. Type your message on paper and experience this mechanical office staple from the not-so-distant past.

Numerous YouTube videos confirm that the device can type. OK, only in capital letters, and certainly not as smoothly and reliably as the Underwood that inspired it, but it does write. For $119.99, this is an affordable way to get a brand-new writing machine! Or at least, a way to type a few notes.

I haven't tried it myself, but so far, I am certainly more impressed with it than with the nonfunctional Lego typewriter and its imitations. Since it's a keyboard machine, it is also considerably more complex than the functional, 3D-printed neo-Mignon. 

The device is made primarily of laser-cut wooden parts. (Early Remingtons successfully used wooden key levers.) Other parts are plastic or metal, including springs.

Austrian blogger Rodja Pavlik reached out to Rokr, and the company provided the following interview and facts. (The questions seem to have been posed by ROBOTIME to ROKR. I'm unclear on the relation between these two companies. — Update: see comments for a clarification.) Thanks to Rodja for sharing this text! You can find his own reflections on this typewriter at Die Schreibmaschinisten (Google English translation here).

Principal mechanical invention credit for the Rokr typewriter goes to Yuzhen Wang, who worked with product designer Chaorui Guo and product manager Yifan Zhu.

The text below has a few quirks that show it was not written by native English speakers, but it's quite understandable. I've added a few comments in brackets.

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