Final touches on the Burroughs Portable adding machine restoration; refreshing the infill of the black numeral keys. The white infill of the black keys had worn - partly lost and with 'bubbles' showing black.
They were fine from a distance, but now that we've gone this far in restoring this machine...
In the usual manner, some latex paint was mixed to be close to the cream of the white keys. Then applied with a small brush to all the black keys. The black keys are nicely smooth, so after letting the latex-paint dry any excess wipes off easily and cleanly. Refreshed keyboard!
Even when not seeing exactly what was changed, the machine simply looks a little 'cleaner' still.
To illustrate that the infill really is not white - it's almost light-brown - pictured here below with a white sheet of paper for contrast.
This wide-carriage specimen still had 6 tabulator stops fitted - from looking at other machines online that's not a bad score. On this eight-column machine, there are indeed 6 positions to evenly fill the width of the carriage. To however also have a stop at the centre - e.g. to park the carriage or when using the paper-roll - a seventh stop would have been nice. Hmm.
Definitely going a bit far for this Burroughs Portable; a few new, extra tabulator stops were manufactured and added to the machine. Yes, excessive ;)
(Quickly-made tabs from tough plastic - surprisingly strong. Now that these work well enough, won't be making them from brass sheet. Added bonus is that they're easily identified as fake-parts.)
They blend in reasonably well, and functional - like the whole machine :-)
