I am delighted this old thread has legs. There is so much to be said here - and much of it probably said already, because I never could quite wrap my head around the more that I had to read all of a long thread before saying anything, though I clearly should go back and read something. But let me throw this in...

Reverse engineering a mechanism, on the surface is about the simplest kind of reverse engineering there is, seems like all you would have to do is make precision copies of all the parts by some method and rebuild the original. More on whether this is reverse engineering in a moment, but the thought percolating in my mind about this is that manufacturing in metal is not often simply a matter of reproducing the same external shape - the largely invisible internal structure of the metal counts too, since even for a fixed alloy composition the full characteristics of the part depend heavily on how the part was processed to arrive at the end. Parts can be molded, machined, forged and cold-formed and every variation and combination thereof, and making a part suitable for a given purpose involves this history as well as the final shape.

History here is a shorthand for microstructure - it is irrelevant as it always is how the end results were achieved, provided that all relevant characteristics of the end state are known. So a full functional copy of a complex machine would not involve simply copying all part shapes by 3-D printing in metal but copying their strength and wear characteristics - and mutatis mutandis even the microstructure is not really the goal but the physical properties, though copying the microstructure would copy the properties.  So do not expect simply because all mechanical shapes in a machine were reproduced to suitable tolerances by a different manufacturing method that the machine will work as designed: it may at first, but probably not for long!

But supposing we could copy even the detailed physical characteristics of the parts, is this reverse engineering? I would tend to think not, any more than reproducing a novel on a copying machine is writing. Engineering in broad strokes is accomplishing the other than purely aesthetic aspects of a design by intelligent manipulations of mental models - which is vague enough to include other human acts of intellectual creation. So finally to create new typewriters - or novels, or automobiles, or computer programs - in the tradition of the things being reproduced, so that the things would continue to organically grow and thrive rather than degrade, we would need a being who reproduced the original mental models used in the design and continued to use them and improve on them in continuing to develop intelligent and creative new variations on the mechanical poems called "typewriters".

In other words if you want new designs you need skilled designers, and that is a craft even harder to learn than repairing them!  It's a lost art and is unlikely to ever come again.

Now to try out my new lost art SM-9 wide carriage elite typeface potato. If there were a market for such things today they would cost $1000's new which means this one in very good condition might be worth $500 used - whereas in fact I paid less than a tenth of that delivered. I must weight my sadness at the lost mechanical art with my own short term windfall. Myopia wins as usual.

 

treefaller wrote:

It's specific function is for drafting, first drafting, and only for drafting. After that you transfer your words into a computer word processor for editing.

That's exactly what I use typewriters for, except I don't transfer anything to the PC until its been edited to a final draft.

treefaller wrote:

But the drafting process has been the bugaboo with me all along.

Why? In what way?

treefaller wrote:

I still love pounding the keys of old manual typers. But I also love the little bit of flexibility to go back and correct typos before they are committed to paper, and maybe to add a sentence or two earlier on without having to write a pencil comment on the page and then later re-typing the whole page.

Like it or not that's editing on the fly, a temptation that is more easily avoided when using a typewriter for drafts. If you're adding in sentences with your Neo, editing as you go along, then I fail to see the difference between using it or the word processor on your computer.