Underwood Electric: crafting new legends

Welcome to the blog formerly known as Writing Ball.

When we last saw my Underwood Electric, I was engaged in an alarming-looking process of swapping its drab plastic keys for metal-ringed ones from a circa-1930 Underwood portable parts machine. 

I've made some progress. Here we see most of the new keys installed, along with a good-looking spacebar from a '30s Remington Streamliner parts machine and two large "RETURN" keys found in my stash of Royal parts. It's a blend of parts and styles from various decades, but I think it looks good.

Some keys had to be disassembled (which is a bit challenging, since the metal ring is a very tight fit).

Why did they have to be disassembled? Because these four key legends don't match the keyboard layout on the Underwood Electric.

I scanned the key legends and used some simple photoshopping to create four new legends that match the Electric:

But five more key legends had to be created in a more elaborate way.

I found a font that was to my liking, akaPosse, on dafont.com.

Then, with considerable trial and error, I managed to create these key legends using inDesign:

Then I took screen shots of the key legends and incorporated them into my Photoshop document:

I tried printing the document on ivory paper on an inkjet printer.

The printing, predictably, was a bit less than crisp, so I reprinted on a laser printer.

To be continued ...