Olympia Professional ES 105 Typewriter

[HaaTa]

Been busy...acquiring more keyboard related devices.
Anyways, I have a bunch to post. Now just to find the time to do it

Found this at WeirdStuff in Sunnyvale, CA.













Lol


This is the ink level changer from above, made by Cherry it seems.







Yup, this switch was made by Marquardt...in 1983! Waaaay before their attempt at ergonomic keyboards in the 90's.














Yup, looks to be NKRO.


Hmm, SKM...seems to be an Austrian company that went bankrupt in 2008.









Oh, and I forgot to mention. They are REALLY clicky, and tactile. Worlds better than anything Cherry has put in terms smoothness and clickiness. It is moderately tactile, reminds me of beamspring-like tactility.

Once I get setup with a soldering iron again, I'll make an attempt to dismantle one of the switches.

[hoggy]

That's some beast.

Glad to hear about the marquardt switches - I have a couple of the mini ergos and the switches are now terrible.

[Ascaii]

I recently stumbled on a different Olympia Typewriter with ancient white Cherry switches...not the clicky ones, but the quasi-linear ones found in the Loewe BTX board I own. I must admit I had to viciously kick the crap out of the typewriter to recover the PCB from the ~20kg Monster, since you aren't really permitted to remove items from our recycling plants. I have yet to make pictures of it.

[Elrick]

Oh, and I forgot to mention. They are REALLY clicky, and tactile. Worlds better than anything Cherry has put in terms smoothness and clickiness. It is moderately tactile, reminds me of beamspring-like tactility.

Once I get setup with a soldering iron again, I'll make an attempt to dismantle one of the switches.

If you are some kind of "MacGyver" are you able to re-solder the switches onto a keyboard pcb and use them?

In short you can create a totally NEW type of keyboard with those switches. But that would only be for the ultra-experienced in keyboard construction.

[damorgue]

Looks a bit like a bunch of old FACIT typewriters that I found. The dude had a room full of them. Some where digital, but most of them were even older.

Spoiler:

[HaaTa]

I'll probably just build a controller for it. If you look at the stabilizers (highest quality I've ever seen, bar none), they require some fancy mechanical design to integrate into the steel plate (which I'd rather not have to do ).

If I get a spare moment today, I'll post something else.

[Icarium]

Sweet.

[daedalus]

The keycap mounts are quite beam spring esque.

I remember finding an ASR-43 (not 33) teletype that had some really nice switches that felt quite like beamsprings, except the mechanism was worn, so it would get a bit stuck on the up travel.

[HaaTa]

Next week perhaps, I'll desolder a switch and take it apart.
I lucked out, but the switches seem very lightly used, that, or aged very well.