My newest passion, addiction, and endeavor is refurbishing typewriters. I have had a vintage typewriter for years, but I bought it already serviced. I found a typewriter at the flea market that was such a reasonable price I decided to get it and figure out how it all worked. And I did. There were some problems with it that were unrepairable, at least for my current skill set, but it opened the flood gates to buying many (MANY) vintage machines and begin bringing them back to life.
I have and will continue to refurbish a bunch of these and then list them for sale in my Etsy shop. It does take time. It also take uninterrupted time, which is the kind of time I don’t find much of these days.
One of the machines from my personal collection that I am trying to work all the kinks out of is an Everest K3 with script typeface. It would be considered an ultraportable and the serial number indicates that it was one of last ones produced by this manufacturer.
When it arrived it was a mess. I will post some before and after shots of it. The exterior hasn’t changed much, although I have throughly cleaned it. The mechanics, however, are another story. It had a lot of problems. When I post the before and after shots I will list all the repairs I had to do on the machine. I still have one nagging shift issue to resolve, but today I did some of the final touches.
The one I wanted to document was a tip I have never come across, but worked great. The rubber or felt pieces that pad the space bar are often deteriorated on these old machines. I decided to try using felt furniture pads cut to size (and trimmed in width) to replace these. That worked so great. They have a self-adhesive backing that allows for easy placement and ultimately easy replacement if they need to be changed out in the future.
Now I just have to solve this shifting dilemma and she will be completely revived!
water ink & ribbon 