What the garage did to No. 2

I started this hobby in the garage, like a sensible person. Workbench, vise, good light, a concrete floor you can spill on. That lasted one summer.

The top strip is No. 2, a little Royal portable, typed in September of 2024 after it had spent June, July, and August on a shelf out there. In May it had typed a clean line. I hadn’t touched it since. Half the letters are faint, a few didn’t arrive at all, and the ones that did are standing wherever they happened to land. Nothing was broken. It had spent ninety days in air you could wring out.

What the air does

This is what I found when I opened it up, and what I’ve found since on machines that came out of garages, sheds, and one screened porch.

Rust starts on the bright steel. Not the painted parts. The typebars, the segment, the screws, the carriage rails, anything left bare so it could slide. It begins as a brown haze you can wipe off with your thumb. A season later you can’t. On No. 2 the haze was in the segment slots, and that’s all it takes: every bar dragging a little on its way up and back.

Old oil goes to gum faster in heat. Whatever was put in there when the machine was new thickens up. Same symptom as rust, slow bars, and usually you’ve got both.

The case is the worst place of all. I’d have guessed a case protects a machine. But the felt and the wood and the glue hold damp like a sponge, and then you’ve shut the typewriter in with it. Every musty machine I’ve bought had lived in its case. Mine sit out on the shelf now, under a cotton dish towel for the dust, and the cases go in the closet, empty, with the lids open.

Cotton rots. Drawbands, mostly. See No. 10.

Rubber does whatever it wants. Platens go hard. Feet sometimes go the other way and turn to something like tar. I can’t tell you which you’ll get.

What I do about it

I moved into the guest room, which is inside the air conditioning, and that’s nine-tenths of it. My wife’s terms were that solvents stay out on the lanai and that guests, when we have them, get the room back. Both fair.

The rest is small stuff. There’s a cheap dial hygrometer on the shelf at eye level, and my rule is that it reads under 50 percent. In winter the house does that on its own. From June on it doesn’t, so a dehumidifier runs in the corner, set to 45. In August I empty its bucket every other day; in February, maybe once a week.

Bright steel gets wiped once a season with a rag that has a few drops of light machine oil on it. A film, not a coat. Each machine has a packet of silica gel sitting in its basket, and I bake the packets dry in the oven every couple of months, when I remember.

And nothing sits on the floor, ever, which brings me to the season.

The season

Hurricane season runs from the first of June to the end of November, and the part people here watch hardest is right now, from the middle of August into October. I look at the National Weather Service forecast most mornings this time of year, the way I used to look at the dispatch board.

When something’s headed our way, the typewriters are about fourteenth on the list, after water, the shutters, the cars, the neighbors, and my wife’s mother. But they’re on the list, and the drill takes forty minutes. Every machine goes into a lidded plastic tote with its silica packet, two to a tote with a towel between them, and the totes go on the top shelf of the hall closet, which is the highest inside spot in a one-story house. I’ve run the drill more often than I’ve needed it, which is how you want that to go.

The storm itself isn’t the only worry. There’s the week after. No power means no air conditioning and no dehumidifier, and a closed-up house here gets to 80 percent inside of two days. The totes buy time. That’s all they do.

No. 2 now

It got the same segment flush as No. 9, a going-over of the rails with fine steel wool and a little oil, and two years on a shelf in a dry room. The bottom strip is from last week. Same machine, same kind of ribbon, same line. The only thing I really changed was the air.