About this bench

I’m Walt. I spent thirty-three years as an elevator mechanic, most of them in northeast Ohio, retired in 2021, and moved with my wife to Florida that fall: Pasco County, a little inland from the Gulf, north of Tampa. Everything I worked on for three decades weighed tons and could hurt you. I wanted a hobby where the worst that happens is a pinched finger.

In the fall of 2023 I bought a typewriter case at a garage sale. Then I bought a typewriter, a Royal portable that almost worked, and spent a month finding out why it only almost worked. That was No. 2. There are fifteen numbers on the shelf now.

Telvanor is the name on a small brass plate riveted inside the lid of that first case, which had no typewriter in it and no other markings, and I’ve never found out who or what Telvanor was.

Where I work

In the guest room. I started out in the garage, and the garage is too damp; there’s a whole note about that. The bench is a solid-core door across two filing cabinets, under the window. The machines sit on a steel shelf unit along the opposite wall, each with a brass key tag wired to it and a number stamped on the tag. Anything involving solvent happens out on the lanai with the fan on, and comes back in dry. Those were the terms.

Why I write it down

Because I solved the same problem twice. In February I spent an evening working out why a carriage dragged, and realized near the end that I’d worked out the very same thing on a different machine a year earlier and forgotten it.

So since March of 2026, every machine gets written up when I’m done with it: where it came from, what was wrong, what I did, what I couldn’t do, how many evenings. And every one gets the same line typed on it before I start and after I stop. How I read those lines has a page of its own.

What this isn’t

It isn’t a shop. I don’t sell typewriters and I don’t take in repairs, not for money and not as a favor to a friend of a friend. I’m an amateur with a toothbrush, and I’d only make your grandmother’s typewriter worse.

It isn’t a manual either. I try to say plainly what I saw and what I did. When I say why something works, that’s my understanding, and it’s sometimes wrong. The years I give for machines are guesses from the look of them.

And there’s no way to reach me through it. No form, no address, no comments. This is my notebook. You’re welcome to read over my shoulder.