Christmas brings out the crazies (both sellers AND buyers), although I wouldn't necessarily agree that prices are maintained throughout the year at the seasonal high. I may be new to the scene, but I've spent many years buying & selling all kind of things and have never observed that to be true. Unless, of course, one counts those listings by the deluded, of which there are many.

My own, smallish collection has, thus far, cost me an average of £27.70 ($37.50) per machine, plus an additional average of £7.60 ($10.30) each for carriage, fuel & sundry other expenses. This doesn't include a couple of donor / parts machines which haven't cost a single penny. The highest, individual amount I've paid to date, was £57 for a '61 Rheinmetall KsT.



 

Sounds like a sweet score, FW - I have never seen a Secretarial 76 in the UK & nor do I expect to, but from what I've seen on the Davis Brothers' site, it would certainly fit with my modernist aesthetic. 

My SG1 cost the princely sum of £21.50 (just under $30) - along with a 200 mile round trip on company fuel & time (they owed me a favour!). As with many Ebay 'collection only' auctions, the bidding was less than frenzied, starting at £18.

My agonies (and induced laziness) have prevented me from spending any time with the machine since collection, but here's a (mildly enhanced) pic from the original listing:

SG1 Closeup by Frank Judge, on Flickr


I hope I feel better soon, too - but the reality is that I've gotten away with not seeing a dentist for thirty four years, and now have my first real problem, which will certainly require extraction of the offending molar. Not much worries me in this world, but when it comes to dentists and dentistry, I'd honestly rather spend a day locked in a cage with a hungry tiger... *shudders*



 

Uwe wrote:

MancFrank wrote:

Looks like Modern Congress Elite (No. 98) to me.

​The type slug face is marked with the installed typeface number.
 

Thanks, Uwe, but I'm not at home for a few days & cannot confirm - hence the non - committal 'looks like'. It was an opportunistic purchase which I barely managed to get home before setting off!

Thanks, FW - mine certainly is, I'm rather pleased with it.

Well, it had to happen sometime I suppose - today, a standard joins the collection:

1977 (I think) Olympia SG3L. Needs a clean & has a dead / disconnected double space key. At least the elusive paper support is present!

[img]SG3L by Frank Judge, on Flickr[/img]

 

Markmotown wrote:

Yeah, I'm currently stewing over a machine that I missed, too. 
There was a Craiglist ad about a two hour drive from my house for an "old typewriter" that wasn't working, so it was being sold for "decor purposes only." They were asking $18. 
It was a Densmore. 
I scrambled to reply that I'd be happy to take it off their hands, and felt pretty good about it, since it had only been posted online for less than an hour. But I never got a reply, and then the ad was taken down. 
Grrrrrr.... 

I feel you on that, Mark. I'm currently being 'given the run around' by two different, small ads sellers on both a Royal O type Standard Portable & (yet another!) early seventies SM9 - which are both being offered for chump change...