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Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Info Post
Dave and I just finished making the mechanical repairs and tweaks to an ALPINA that I'll be bringing down with me to the meeting. It's an old green one, serial 96228 and it's not labeled as Alpina but rather as AMC. It's the oldest Alpina-made AMC I've seen. Since I have a green Alpina in the 130,000 range, and two late gray and white ones (one an AMC and the other the only known AVONA) I'll be more than happy to give this one away. It's in good enough shape that you could enter the typing contest on it.

I have begun to gather other machines to bring along with me by request; one of those is the Groma Combina. What a horrible contraption. Maybe if it were new and well adjusted it might be all right, or at least OK but at this point it's really not a good machine. The devil's in the details and the redone details to take the Groma portable from regular machine to removable carriage machine are just not well done. We have a number of machines with removable carriages (like the SIEMAG) or type baskets (like the Blick 90) or whole typing action units (Pittsburg, Reliance, Imperial) and most of them are better than this Combina. It's true that the only online story about one I found and translated was about how bad they were.

But that makes a rare machine now, doesn't it? Bad then meant low sales then, which meant scarcity shortly in number and in spare parts. It really should be no surprise that the majority of really rare typerwiters are also really BAD typewriters, should it?

Getting closer to launch time Friday morning....

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