Most typewriters I buy are easy and nonremarkable purchases; I drive to the seller's location, hand them some cash, and leave. On rare occassions the purchase becomes a little more complex, which was the case yesterday when I bought this 1950 Olympia Plana. 

When I come across a typewriter that is for sale that interests me, there are two basic considerations that I have to find acceptable: the machine's cost, and where it is located. In the case of this Plana, the cost was fair - $40 for a model that was in my opinion very collectable - but the seller was an hour's drive from me. Normally I don't bother with anything that is outside of the city, but in this case I felt the Plana was worth the drive.

Reaching the seller was uneventful, as was the purchase. A very pleasant man who I chatted with for a while before packing the typer into the trunk of my car. It all went downhill from there.

Deciding that I could find a quicker and shorter route home, I quickly found myself lost on dirt roads that were covered in solid ice, some of which dead-ended because they were actually closed for the winter. The driving was treacherous; without snow tires my car struggled up the steep hills and slid all over the road in a desperate attempt to gain traction. The stupid detour had cost me an extra half hour, but I was happy to be back on a main highway - well that was until a truck in front of me fired a rock from one of its tires that hit and cracked my car's windshield. I was really regretting having made this trip and began to doubt my obsession with typewriters.

Finally home, I gave the machine a good look. It was a wreck. The ribbon needed replacement, which wasn't a surprise, but the spools had been permanently fastened to their shafts and couldn't be removed. The Plana uses special spools, and over the years they must have been lost and replaced with regular spools that some clever person mechanically fastened to the machine to get them to work. It's something that I'll get around to fixing eventually, but for now I just wanted to replace the ribbon so that I could test the machine.

What happened next wasn't a pretty sight. I don't recommned trying to replace a ribbon while a spool is still on a machine, especially not one that uses spring-loaded ribbon covers that have to constantly be held open to access the spool. Needless to say there was ink everywhere, on everything, but I persevered and managed to load the typer with fresh ribbon.

The test brought to light a number of issues with the typewriter. The carriage will need to be removed because the ball retainers are not properly aligned. Also out of alignment is the uppercase type, the vibrator is inconsistent in its operation, the margin stops are seized, the tabulator doesn't work, and the machine stinks like a wood burning stove.

I'd had enough for one day and put the typewriter back in its case. Sitting back I weighed what I had gone through to get this machine that required many hours of work to restore it to full functionality. Was it worth it? Absolutley. From experience with the Optima Plana I already owned, I knew that the type action on these machines isn't very good, but I can't get over its design and aesthetic appeal. Finding this typer, a rare late model version that had originally been sold in Canada, filled a hole in my Olympia collection and became a sister machine to the Optima and would provide an invaluable comparison model to it.

Not all typewriters are easy purchases. Some take extra effort and become enough of a bother that they leave you wondering if it had all been worth it. And when you end up with a machine in less than perfect condition you might even start questioning your sanity, something that some who know me think I lost the day bought my second typewriter.  

Happy hunting eveyone!