TA Royal Alpha 610
A TA Royal Alpha 610 typewriter turned into a keyboard in micho___'s first hand-wired project.
KBD.newsPublished August 20, 2021
Creators! Feel free to
tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 140K readers.
micho___'s project blurs the line between electric typewriters and mechanical keyboards with his handwired conversion.
So I found a Royal Alpha 610 electric typewriter at Goodwill for $15. It was in awful condition but I just had to grab it anyways.
Specifications:
- Original Cherry doubleshot ABS keycaps
- Vintage Cherry M9 switches (lubed with Krytox 205g0)
- Original steel plate
- 3D printed PLA case
- Microcontroller: Elite-C
- 18 AWG magnet wire
Some hi-res images: https://imgur.com/gallery/wDm20Xz
Photolog of the process: https://imgur.com/gallery/hlE0zLl
This was both therapeutic and painful to do at the same time.
Published on Fri 20th Aug 2021. Featured in KBD #40 (source).
Related
Looking at this IBM Selectric teardown I'm glad we build mechanical keyboards and not typewriters.
The Siemens T4200 is a kick-ass electronic screen-typewriter system from the '80s with a not less kick-ass keyboard: the
Siemens T4000.
u/bII6 converted an
Olympia Splendid 66 typewriter to Colemak.
An old write-up on the inner working mechanism and general evolution of Japanese typewriters.
The retrofuturistic Luigi Colani office chair features a built-in split Selectric-style typewriter.
Typewriters from the '80s that used small ball point pens to draw text and graphics.