Cleaned Remington Portable #2

Case cleaned with already a first blackening. Loose leathercloth and splitting wood glued down and the white paint stains also removed from the case. Lid sides are slightly bulging from being forced down over the machine without the carriage knob being pushed in.

The bare machine, mostly clean now...

Feed rollers front and rear...

Rusty, with some traces of the plating...

Even the type has some rust on it, looks like it is marked '6d' or is it 'p9'?

Portable #2 Project

First new typewriter purchase in over a year. It is a bit of a project. Mostly complete I think, with lots of  accumulated grime and dust. Rust also.

For a while I had been looking for a Remington Portable with the folding typebar mechanism, ideally one from the 30-ies (a 'Compact Portable'). But the paint on this one made it stand out. So even though it is (I think) a 1928 model, contacted the seller and got it.

Nice touch is that the red Remington label is placed on the case under the keyboard. It's in need of a thorough cleaning and de-rusting, but the paintwork and overall machine will I think be worth working on. Likely will need some new nickel plating too.

Serial number NL84802.

Linguaphone wordmark

When mocking-up an index label for the small record case a while ago, I couldn't find a clean graphic of a suitable period logo of Linguaphone online. They are of course still an active company that have updated their wordmark over the decades. So the old, 1930-ies style wordmark is not so readily found on a net-search. Even if it's online, it is being drowned out by the current logo.

So used a plain sans-serif (Gill). The original index label also did not use the ornate wordmark (in gold on inside of the lid), but a simple sans-serif text.

Then a couple of weeks after that, I got another small set of records that were put in old Linguaphone sleeves. These are tabbed sleeves as would have been used in this small carrying case with index label for a language course. (With extra information on other available courses, including a plug by/for Mr. Shaw.)

Too late for the mocked-up index label for the carrying case; but now here on the web an old style Linguaphone wordmark taken from the sleeve in a clean image file. Will probably still be drowned out by the more recent logo in a web-search, but there is at least 1 image file online now. Maybe for a next project :)

Know your typewriter

About 15 minutes, no sound, but lots of typewriters shown in pristine condition. Movie is over at archive.org, also viewable there and downloadable in several formats.

Estimate it dates from the late thirties.

Very informative, especially for those not familiar with the whole concept of a typewriter.

Sleeved portables parallels

A clipping from Popular Science of January 1938. The wonders of modern technology and engineering can make a portable so small that it slides in a briefcase. Not mentioned by name, but I think probably a Hermes Featherweight machine.

Wonders of modern technology and engineering can make a portable so small that it slides in an envelope. 

Striking parallels here :)

Price of a new Corona 3 typewriter

That was a couple of days ago. Can't find the ad back again, very likely already sold. It looked in very good condition, complete with original tools. And of course with the original invoice.

The price-index table is here at the Dutch central statistics bureau, the 'CBS'. With the price development of items being different and the income development also varying quite a bit, no single index number is 'true', but it does give an impression of the order of magnitude. (These income and price developments are even more widely divergent when looking at North America and Europe over the last century.)

Also looking at some indexed prices of standards (desktops) and portables (laptops), there seems to be an approximate value for the function of creating documents (office) that is reasonably constant over time.

The value of the benefit, rather than the cost of the solution perhaps.

A thought (:

Parlophone Parvus Plays

The soundbox is now decent, but not quite on the acoustic quality level it could be. Some of the parts are made of zamak, like many of these reproducers. The material is ideal for such small parts; easily molded with good accuracies and nice smooth finish. A drawback is that over decades it corrodes from the inside and the whole part swells. It can become as brittle as a dried-out sandcastle.

This soundbox was not quite that bad, but a lug of the pivot-cover did break off in my hands by just touching it. Replacing the gaskets that hold the diaphragm was something I did not dare to attempt. The gaskets are hard, but have glued themselves to the metal in some places. The ring already showed cracks on the outside, so the risk of the ring totally breaking apart is just too high.

Carefully taking it only partially apart and gently cleaning and painting does make it look much better again though. With the cleaning, the pivot should be a bit better also.

With a new gasket on the flange that fits in the tone arm it does look the part again. Even though it's a bit lacking in treble and more 'buzz' risk on loud parts than it should have. It is however freely moving and will not damage records unduly.

Now the brake still needs some seeing to, but otherwise it is getting there. Definitely not as new; it has plenty of scuffs and marks and looks its age, but again the Parvus is a very neat and usable compact portable gramophone.

:)