Most old typewriters don’t need to become museum pieces. What they need most is someone willing to listen when they say what they need. A typewriter wants to type, and I help it get there.
I’m Brandon, the mechanic behind The Typewriter Mechanic, a small workshop in central Pennsylvania where portable typewriters arrive dusty, sticky, occasionally disgruntled, and generally convinced they’ve been retired for good.
My job is to persuade them otherwise.
I don’t call myself a restorer because restoration suggests returning a machine to an imagined perfect past. I’m more interested in helping it have a useful future. Honest wear, faded or chipped paint, and the occasional scratch are part of a typewriter’s biography. (A broken escapement, however, is simply unacceptable.)
This journal exists alongside my workshop.
You’ll find practical advice for new collectors, notes from the repair bench, bits of typewriter history, the occasional rabbit hole, and stories about machines that somehow became more interesting the longer they sat.
If you’re looking for immaculate collectibles, you may find them here from time to time...
But if you’re looking for machines with another book, screenplay, dissertation, love letter, or grocery list still left in them, you’re definitely in the right place.
Thanks for stopping by. Please check out what's on the bench today.
— Brandon