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!