Oh, and you also have to mess with these metal collar thingies, pulling off old ribbon and winding your new ribbon onto each one from its spool. Make sure your typewriter has both of these present before you part with cash.The Loop. Well worth the bother! The typing is heavenly on this bulbous beast. Not noiseless by any means but a lot quieter than most, and no braille effect on the back of the paper.
But I’ll do it anyway. Waited six weeks for this book to arrive on inter-library loan. Only to discover some lazy ass undergraduate ( dear god I hope it was an undergrad) of York University, had defaced half the effin book. Their only saving grace the fact that they opted for pencil as their tool of interjection and irritating interruptions.
What the heck is this message?Huh?I don’t think anyone is there to answer the phone any more …To replace the data-wiping defunct CR2032, you need a set of torx/ starhead screwdrivers. Not in my regular typewriter repair box. Luckily I was able to find a set in another toolkit in the house. Once inside the Neo, you need to take out another four screws holding the motherboard in place. Gently lift the board up to free it enough to clear space next to the lithium battery, as there’s a plastic peg preventing the battery from falling out, and I suspect also to give unsuspecting home repair efforts that moment of pure unbridled frustration when the battery refuses to budge. Everything back to normal but also back to factory settings. Thankfully I only lost about 2k words, and it wasn’t day 29 of Nanowrimo. Glad to have my old friend functioning properly now with no more scary messages!
The last straw broke on this little chair over the holidays. It had been waiting so long for an upgrade it didn’t take much for the seat to give way. Fortunately no gravy was spilled. Taking the old rush weave away was really interesting if very dusty. You can see that the rushes were twisted in small sections around the woodwork, and left flat inside.And here we have the flowers to try and identify the species. One candidate is many-headed woodrush. Though that only grows to 40 cms so I’m still searching. Chair weaver knots. They’re not really knots but a sort of clever twist.I spent several days hand sanding all the old dark varnish away. A coat of Renaissance wax brings out all the lovely colours of this Victorian chair. I found a place online that sells reels of reel rush. Pre twisted rush which must be soaked before use and then drained and left for a little while before work begins. The old way to secure the first length is with string, not tacks. The chair had no tacks holding the old rushes in place. Here we go with the help of a couple of videos on YouTube.Having got this far I realised I’d made a couple of mistakes and had to go back. I spent the next four hours checking every corner as I went, and hoping my one kilo of reel rush really was enough for this size chair seat. As I came closer to the strings, I snipped them away, as the weave was holding everything in place. The clip hold the loose end in place while I take a new length of rush from the coil. My knots were large and ugly but I managed to hide them all inside the weaving. I padded the little gaps between upper and lower sides of the seat with rush clippings, just as the original seat weaver had done. One happy chair. Next time I would rather try the traditional method of twisting my own rush, as the pre twisted rush is an absolute pain when it starts to tangle itself into curly knots. But overall I’m very pleased with my first try at this ancient old craft. The chair is now extremely comfortable, and smells of summer!
Typed with Remington de luxe 5, and Smith Corona classic 12, with 6cpi. These are the scrambled anonymous confessions from the Waiting Wall project originally exhibited at Brighton train station, in 2015, and online. These days the website is “insecure”, Firefox informs me, so I will not be attempting to collect any more screenshots of the morphing confessions online. However I do have a large cache to work with.
I’m making some simple sea scapes today. No clouds. The sky portion will be used for scrambled text from the “waiting wall” project from some years ago. When I moved house 2 years ago, my first waiting wall project became lost. I only discovered this recently, and wanted to replace it. However just repeating myself isn’t all that inspiring. Let’s see what happens!
Type The Clouds 
