Juan Tabo Library Type-In

We had our first Type-In of the year at another local library, this time at the Juan Tabo Library in northeast ABQ, just a few miles from the foothills of the Sandia Mountain Wilderness. This library is the closest to my neighborhood and one I've walked to on numerous occasions; although the Tony Hillerman Library, though further away, is the one I favored since childhood, as it is located in a quiet neighborhood off the main boulevards and the grounds of that library are tended by the Albuquerque Rose Garden Society.

Before delving into the Type-In itself, I must digress into another of my world-famous "stories." This involves recalling that, in the early 1960s and before, Juan Tabo was not a paved street, but rather a dirt road that ran north-south, from roughly the Route 66 area on the southern edge of town northward, then angled northeasterly and continued north along the foothills of the Sandias. This dirt road was famous for its "wooptie-doos," as the road was a seemingly endless series of up-and-down hills, the thrill being to drive the family sedan (most families only had one vehicle in those days) as fast as possible over the hills and down the dales, seeing how close you could come to getting airborne.

By the early 1970s Juan Tabo was paved into a 6-lane boulevard as it is today, but there was very little city development on the southern half, and I can remember riding the yellow Schwinn Varsity ten-speed bike down the middle of Juan Tabo, over to Central Avenue (the former Route 66), and eastward to the Four Hills area, where I'd park my bike and hike the hills to gain a vantage point suitable for watching military and civilian air traffic on base, adjacent to Manzano Base. Today, you'd be a traffic statistic if you tried riding a bicycle down any major thoroughfare in ABQ, as evidenced by the numerous ghost bike memorials around town, set up to memorialize a bicyclist killed in traffic.

Another thing that happened when Juan Tabo was paved was that the northern part after the bend in the road became Tramway Road, a two-lane paved road popular for late-night muscle car racing in the late 1960s. Today it too is a 6-lane thoroughfare that leads to the Sandia Peak Tram, where today you can ride up to the top of the mountain and dine in fine style at an altitude of 10,300 feet.

Okay, that glassy look in Joe's eyes has diminished and he's returned to the present era. Enough of the story-telling.

One of the requirements for a library-based typewriter event is an adequate meeting room, and Juan Tabo has that, a spacious, modern room with plenty of tables and chairs, and a helpful staff. Due to its location adjacent to the children's reading section, we attracted a good number of families with kids, which we always like having. It's fun to instruct them on how to use a typewriter, and the parents this day were very considerate of being careful with these old machines.



We've held previous typewriter events at a number of libraries around town and we've found them to be a great venue. Most public libraries have a meeting room available, and the library staff are very helpful in putting our event on their calendar, which helps us to market the event using the library's credibility. Also, for libraries that we've frequented before, their staff are very helpful in getting graphic images of the event to new libraries having their first event.



Previously we've held several Type-Ins per year at local libraries, but this year we are expanding our activities. This is due in no small measure to the efforts of our members Woz Flint and Matthew Bouchard. Type-In events we consider to be public outreach to the community at large, helping to spread the word that typewriters are still relevant and useful in this digital age. But since Kevin Kittle and myself formed the ABQwerty Type Writer Society a few years ago, we envisioned it to be about more than just collectors of antique machinery. The word "Type" in our title relates to the hardware, the machinery, the collecting and restoring efforts required to keep these creative engines running; but the "Writer" in our title was another part of our vision, to appeal to the creative community of writers, to enable them to discover these fantastic tools that might aid them in furthering their creative efforts.



This year we've begun two new kinds of events, besides public Type-Ins. First, we've maintained and grown a contact list of people interested in hearing from us about upcoming typewriter-related events. We notify this private list of what we call Typewriter Pop-Ups, which are small events, usually at local cafes or coffee shops, where we each bring a typewriter and can either write or socialize around our common interest in typewriters. These events are mainly social, we usually get much more chatting done than writing.

But the other new kind of event that we are excited about are what we call a Type Away. These events happen usually at library meeting rooms, and the intent is for minimal socialization and maximum writing. You bring your typewriter and some project you are working on, then get an entire hour to work on your project, undistracted by domestic considerations, accompanied by the symphony of other typewriters clacking away in harmony with yours. We usually have a 15 minute period before and after the writing session to chat and discuss our projects.



Along with Pop-Up and Type Away events, we hope this year to also start getting involved in street typewriter poetry. Woz Flint, our Communications Director and published author, is experienced at public poetry and will be starting us getting involved in these kinds of public typewriter activities. We also hope to host some writing workshops too. Also, in May we will be having a month-long display case in the Cherry Hills Library with typewriters and related ephemera, which we are also excited about.



We've also spread our inky fingers into the world of social media, via Substack and Facebook, assisted by Matthew our resident social media guru. We've found it important to keep touch within various siloed social circles, to spread the news of typewriters as far as we can.

I want to thank the members of the ABQwerty Type Writer Society for all their efforts in making this Type-In the success that it was, and especially Matthew and my dear wife Andrea for helping to haul typewriters for this event, as I'm recuperating from hip replacement surgery. Yes, I'm on the mend and things are going well.

If you are curious as to the origin of the name Juan Tabo, here's a bit more on that.

In the meanwhile, here are the remainder of the images I took during this event. I found it helpful, due to the large number of children present, to only photograph their hands on keyboards, in keeping with the practice of ensuring their privacy.






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You Can't Get These Screws at Home Depot

A crop of my left hip x-ray image post hip joint replacement surgery



Even if they were precision surgical tools!

When I'd returned home from surgery, several weeks ago, my left leg was colored yellow because of the disinfectant they'd used; but that washed away after my first showering. Yet, weeks later, I still had some yellowish tinge to the back of my thigh, along with some nasty-looking bruising. I wasn't sure if that was "normal" or not. It turns out this is perfectly normal for when two skilled surgeons wail away at your hip and femur with sharp instruments, after having folded back the tissues away from the bone.

After Dr. B.'s vivid description of the procedure, I felt like I understood, viscerally, why I am still in pain and why it'll take weeks longer to heal. This kind of surgery is literally traumatic to the strongest bones in a person's body. When he described hanging onto my knee with all his might as Dr. T. dislocated my hip, prior to cutting it apart, I could almost hear the pop it might have made! Okay, I get it now!

But when he told me that those long, self-tapping titanium screws sometimes strip out, I could imagine them asking a nurse to pick up another box at Home Depot. Not! I'm sure they had plenty of parts on-hand.

I don't yet feel like The Six Million Dollar Man, but I'm using a cane now instead of a walker, and every day it seems a bit easier to walk. Getting a good night's rest, finding a comfortable position, is the main challenge so far. But luckily I have Mrs. Six Million Dollar Woman to help!

Messing Around With Typewriter Line Spacing

Royal KMM, a classic American-made standard typewriter with whole-line spacing




The KMM's line spacing clutch button


How I made pencil marks spaced 1/4 inch along the left margin (before typing!)


(The curved lines are from the camera lens)


Aligning the reference line on the backing sheet to the edge of the card guide


Resulting in evenly spaced rows of text at 1.5 line spacing!

The Lost Zeppelin Returns

Well obviously I was being overly dramatic with the title, because the Zeppelin wasn't "lost," just in storage. The box itself was designed to fit in the bed of my Ford Ranger pickup. The frame was made of 1 inch x 2 inch wood, laminated with white corrugated plastic panels and a hinged door on one end. It's wide enough to have fit both halves of the finished airframe, which itself was intended to be joined together at the flying site with couplers that join the longitudinal girders.

The main rings were made from pieces of 1/16 inch by 1/8 inch thick balsa wood, cut to form a 12-sided polygon. I had drawn a pattern onto white foamcore board for the main rings, laminated with thin plastic film. The balsa pieces were glued in place using CA glue and accelerator, each piece pinned in place. The corners where the pieces joined were reinforced with diamond-shaped gussets of 1/32 inch balsa.

The design of the framework was intended to be inspired by the method employed by the original Zeppelins, which had reinforcing wires prestressed across the polygonal main rings. For my reinforcing "wires" I used thin black sewing thread, the ends of each one tied to a map pin and stretched and laid across opposite vertices of the polygon. Once each thread was in place, I then applied CA glue and accelerator to where each end of the threads touched their corresponding gussets. Once dried, I removed the map pins and cut off the excess thread. This process was repeated for all 12 bracing threads on each main ring.

Being as I started this project in the early 2000s and accurate gram scales were harder to come by, I had to find a way to accurately weigh each component to within one gram resolution. I did this by starting with a bag of 1 gram plastic cube weights, that I had acquired a few years earlier from a science store. I made a scale similar to how a fish scale works, with gram weights on each side. Attaching an item to be weighed to one end of the scale, it would slightly tip to one side and the vertical weighted thread would cross a scale marked in one gram increments. This method enabled me to extrapolate weights to a fraction of a gram.

Using this scale, each main ring weighed about 1.5 grams when completed! I thought that was a good indicator that my design might be light enough to float lighter-than-air, yet be sturdy enough to support the loads required.

I purposefully chose a hull profile that was cylindrical, for the reason that the main rings would be the same diameter and hence make construction easier.

When my business assignment came to an end I'd only completed the middle section of the front half, three gas cell bays long. I had to build a small storage box sturdy enough to withstand being moved back home via my household goods. Once home, I continued working on the framework. To begin assembly of the main rings into a hull shape, I built it vertically, joining the vertices of each main ring with longitudinal girders of 1/8 inch by 1/16 inch balsa.

Continuing with the Zeppelin-inspired design, each rectangular panel formed by the intersection of rings and longitudinals were themselves prestressed with diagonal bracing threads, stretched and glued in place using map pins as I'd done with the rings. This design has proven to be sturdy enough to withstand 21 years of summer heat and winter cold in my brother's garage.

I should pause and explain the difference between a "non-rigid" airship and a Zeppelin-type rigid-airship. You could consider there to be two classes of airship hull: pressure airships and rigid types.

Pressure airships maintain the structural rigidity of the hull from internal pressure of the bouyant gas, assisted by internal air-filled ballonets that can be adjusted as needed. Think of the word "blimp" when referring to these.

The Norge in the Arctic

There was also a sub-category of pressure airship known as "semi-rigid," that in addition to internal gas pressure had a rigid keel attached to the bottom of the envelope, useful for attaching loads like gondolas and engines. These were used in the early 20th century for making larger craft at a time when exotic, synthetic fabrics had not yet been developed. The Italian semi-rigid airship Norge was of this type, that succeeded in flying to the North Pole, in 1926. More recently, the Zeppelin company of Germany (yes, they're still around!) developed a version called the Zeppelin NT (for New Technology) that has an internal framework of aluminum and carbon fiber girders to help support the inflated envelope.

A WW1-era rigid airship

Rigid airships, in contrast, maintain the shape of the hull against aerodynamic and aerostatic forces by a rigid hull, in the case of Zeppelins made from a framework of duralumin girders (an alloy of aluminum) and steel bracing wires. Instead of the entire volume of the hull being filled to completion with gas, the spaces between main rings contained large cylindrical balloons called gas cells. The cells were held by nets that transfered the lift from the cells to the framework. One advantage of this design is a leak in one gas cell wouldn't affect the rest of the craft, and each gas cell wasn't pressurized as was the case with blimps.

The ZMC-2 "Tin Blimp"

There was another version of rigid airship called a metal-clad airship, essentially a monocoque rigid metal gas-tight aluminum skin reinforced with internal metal girders. It was strong enough to support itself without internal gas pressure, but was pressurized for flight. One of these was built for the US Navy, the helium-filled ZMC-2, which flew from 1929 to 1941.

LZ-129 Graf Zeppelin

The most successful rigid airship was the German Graf Zeppelin, that used hydrogen lifting gas and, instead of petrol for its engines, used a gaseous fuel gas contained in separate gas cells below the lifting gas cells. The advantage of this type of fuel was as the craft burned fuel during long flights the airship didn't suffer loss of weight, which in a petrol or diesel-powered craft would have meant valving off lifting gas to remain neutrally bouyant. The Graf made many flights from Germany to Brazil, across the Atlantic to North America, explored the arctic and made a round-the-world flight in 1929. But with the destruction of the Hindenburg in 1937 (and the impending war), the rigid's days were numbered.

The LTA Research Pathfinder 1

More recently, a new rigid airship project has been in the works, called LTA Research,, funded by Google founder Sergie Brin. Its framework is made from carbon fiber and titanium and was given license to fly in October 2023. Though only half of the length of the Hindenburg, the 400-foot-long Pathfinder 1 may be superceded by much larger craft.

I last took a look at my model airship in 2012, documented in this blog article. Since then it's sat in its storage box in my brother's unheated garage, over the hot summers and cold winters. I wasn't certain if those delicate balsa and thread connections would hold up to the stress, but in my initial inspection today it seems to have held up better than I'd hoped for. But the large box and delicate model now take up space in my much smaller garage, which leads to the question of what now?

Proponents of rigid airships have often been called dreamers, with their visions of huge leviathans silently floating in the skies. While we don't know if there's a future for the rigid airship, in my case the dream was much more modest, a small model that could float and be propelled by small motors. Like those other dreamers, I still don't know what'll happen to my dream either.

October Typewriter Pop-Up at Little Bear Coffee!

So, what's a "Pop-Up?" It's a short-notice event where you show up with something -- often it's crafts people with a table or booth selling their wares, or whatever -- but in this case we're using the term to mean a small typewriter gathering in a public venue, publicized just to our contact list. We show up, we set up, we eat and/or drink, type and chat. What could be more fun?

Kevin brought his nifty Underwood Portable:



Matt brought this Montgomery Wards-branded Signature 300, made by Brother (he also brought another Brother machine):



Our friend Ian showed up with this beautiful Olympia SM7:



Here's a shot of the trio, Kevin, Matthew and myself (Ian had already left by then):



This was a very balmy October morning, unusually warm (normally by now we'd be wearing light jackets), so sitting outdoors was ideal. It was also good for not disturbing the folks inside the coffee shop with the sound of our typing. Of course, we did more talking than typing, as usually happens, but I have the habit of typing while listening, so I was able to get this one-pager written. Also, along the covered portico were plenty of tables, much easier to sit together than inside.

I also brought the Royal Mercury, in case someone showed up without a machine, or a newbie wanted to try out another machine for themselves, but I ended up leaving it in the car.

We normally schedule 3-4 public Type-In events per year, but in the intervening months it's often not enough to build a healthy social network, hence why we're starting these monthly meet-ups. We look forward to more of these in the future.

We are planning on another of these "Pop-Ups" again at Little Bear Coffee, for early November 10, but we have it scheduled for 1 PM instead of 9 AM, since by then it might actually have cooled off to the point where early morning may be uncomfortable outside. We shall see; it could be snowing! For the remainder of the year into the new year, we will have to find an indoor venue with enough room that can tolerate our noise. Oh if we only had a First Draft Book Bar like the folks in Phoenix do!

Big Blue Gets Renewed

Here I've underlined areas in this pre-repair typing sample where the letter spacing was crowded against other letters. The problem didn't seem to be consistent or present any pattern.



Steve's invoice, whose style harkens back to my TV repair days.


Here's the part Steve replaced. It's obviously an original IBM part, complete with label and part number. It's great having access to a guy who not only was factory-trained and with decades of experience, but still has on-hand original replacement parts.

When he originally restored this machine, he installed a 1.5 line spacing feature (that wasn't originally on these model 721s), and also the EXP or express backspace feature, which involved not only installing additional internal parts, but the EXP button and the L-shaped RETURN button. So this blue 721 is rather unique in having these additional features.


The keyboard now with EXP (express backspace) key and the original rectangular RETURN key now replaced with the L-shaped key.



Of course, the white correction marks do stand out on off-white paper. This is one of the things about owning the 70-series Selectrics, they may be curvy and pretty but don't have lift-off correction.

I've mentioned this before, but electric machines with soft-touch keyboards seem to draw out the typographical errors in me, partly due to my sloppy technique but also because there's less forgiveness when you inadvertently lean on the keys too hard or slightly strike an errant key, it doesn't take much of a key-throw or force to trigger the printing. For this reason, I recently increased the keyboard tension on my 6-series electric SCM machines, and now I'm much less error-prone.

So for now, I'll be mainly using white paper with this Selectric 721, to give the appearance that I'm a decent typist!

Special Collections Library Type-In

I should insert a family story here. Our grandparents had several rental houses, besides their main home at 112 Edith. There was a house on High Street that served as a boarding house during WW2. Some time in the very early 1950s an FBI agent came knocking on Grandpa's door, asking about a tenant name David Greenglass, who had rented a room at the High Street location. It turned out Greenglass was one of the Manhattan project atom bomb spies! So perhaps us kids playing "spy" at the library had more merit to it than it seemed at the time!


The most notable machine at this event was Kevin Kittle's pre-war IBM Electromatic, which he's spent considerable time and not a little bit of money on restoring, including a rebuilt motor, speed control circuit and new platen and power roller. It typed very nicely!


Kevin also brought this IBM Executive, which was a type-bar electric built concurrently with the Selectric, that features proportional spacing (using a system of five spacing units -- the space bar is divided into two halves, one for 2-unit spacing and the other for 3-unit spacing) and uses the power roller drive system with film ribbon spools.


Continuing with Kevin's collection of IBM machines was this Selectric 721, very much like my blue machine. Note the similarity in body styling with the Executive. His types even better than mine! Including an IBM Wheelwriter 2000 (not shown here), Kevin had machines from most of IBM's history.

This is Bill's SCM Electra 220, with the exciting powered carriage return! My Electra 120 is very similar except for the manual carriage return.


Matthew brought this Hermes 10, which immediately reminded me that if I'd known ahead of time, I would've brought my family's Hermes 10 also, the machine our Dad bought for us in the early 1970s. Imagine two Hermes 10s at the same Type-In! Maybe next time!


This pretty blue electric Royal Saturn, a cousin to the manual Royal Mercury (both made by Silver-Seiko in Japan), just had a newly resurfaced platen installed. Sitting in the Electric Corral next to the bigger electrics, it felt a bit overwhelmed, but eventually won over the hearts of the participants by its nearly silent operation.




It had been several years since I brought the venerable Galaxie Twelve to a Type-In, and I'd forgotten how nice these manual 6-series machines can be. This one deserves more love!


At the previous Type-In we held at the Lomo Colorado library in neighboring Rio Rancho, I brought all four of my Hermes 3000s. This time I only brought one, thinking the Cult of Hermes needs to cool its heels for a spell! Still, it was very popular, especially a member of the library staff, who swears she's gonna get one!


I also brought the Underwood 5, a gift from Ted Munk, and it was another popular machine. Several people commented one of their relatives used an Underwood 5, testamony to their ubiquity in the heyday of typewriters.


I brought the Royal KMM, via its laser-cut plywood carrying box, which once again proved its utility in protecting the machine from damage. I would advise at least a plastic bin to transport these large, standard-sized machines, to protect them in transit from dings and dents and to immobilize the carriage to protect the escapement from damage.


I also brought this Underwood-Olivetti Studio 44, in keeping with my theme of larger-sized machines. This is one of my favorite medium-to-large sized portables, I love the aesthetics and typing action, which I think are the best of the manual Olivettis.



Stay tuned for more videos on electrics and also daisywheel machines. In the meanwhile, here's the video about the SCM 6-series electrics. A big thanks to all who helped with the Type-In; our next event will be on August 3rd at the Ernie Pyle library, a small venue (at the former home of the famed WW2 journalist who died in combat), where I will feature pre-WW2 portables.

Also, here's a link to Monroe Business Systems where you can get new print wheels for your daisywheel typewriter!