I know of three professional repairmen in my area, and I live in the fourth largest city in North America. One was factory trained at Underwood, the other at Olympia, and the third worked for an independent repair shop during a time when such tradesmen were on the road all day servicing machines in the field, predominantly for large offices. 

Apparently there is a fourth man, another former Underwood employee, but I don't know anything about him.
 
All three of the ones that I'm familiar with still operate their own typewriter repair business in a brick and mortar storefront; however, I would only describe two of them as actually being active in the trade. One has unofficially retired, but he doggedly hangs out in his shop that has become a gathering point for his friends.

I've only had the opportunity to discuss the concept of passing the baton with two of them, and still intend to ask the third, but neither were at all interested in teaching someone the skills that have served them for so many years. As one pointed out (an 80 year-old who has been in business for 40 years now), professional typewriter repair is a skilled trade onto itself, one that took him four years just to learn the basics of, and has never stopped learning about since then. He actually laughed at how naïve some typewriter enthusiasts and collectors can be. One had approached him for training believing that it would only take a few weeks or months to pass on such learning.

I have no such delusions. I'm a licensed tradesman albeit no longer active in that trade, but I can fully appreciate what is involved in not just attaining the required knowledge and tools, but developing the skills needed to make use of them. The reality is that we live in an era that will see the extinction of the truly skilled typewriter repairman. Sure, there will always be mechanically talented individuals who are resourceful enough to revive a dead machine or restore the operation of one that is broken, but they should never be mistaken for those who were fully versed and extremely talented in the nuances and intricacies of typewriter repair, maintenance and adjustment. There will also always be those enthusiasts who think they know what they're doing when in reality they don't have a clue, but so long as they're only working on their own machines it's not a problem.

What does all of this say about the future of typewriters? The machines will keep on typing, many will limp along because of makeshift repairs and ersatz parts, but only a precious few will work anywhere near their original level of performance. It took the better part of a day for factory-trained experts to adjust and fine-tune a brand new typewriter that had just rolled off the assembly line. Such a machine would have sung like an opera diva and I'm afraid that such performances will soon be lost forever.

Well Im young and slowly learning the trade....


 

I can't find the post I recently stumbled across - maybe it wasn't a recent post - about the kid who wanted to learn typewriter repair apparently thinking this was a three week course, and the look he had on his face when the octogenarian told him he was not sure he had enough time left to teach him.

I gather the deal did not go off, and the problem is, the kid just did not watch enough uplifting movies and did not know the plot!  He is supposed to come back several days later and say "Well sir, I thought about what you said, and we better get started as soon as possible". Then we intercut to a series of scenes where the kid is learning the trade, the years pass, finally he marries the guy's granddaughter and takes over the business and sadly, is attending the old man's funeral. But he learned to repair typewriters! Somebody send this guy a copy of Gran Torino. Sheesh.

Repartee wrote:

I can't find the post I recently stumbled across - maybe it wasn't a recent post - about the kid who wanted to learn typewriter repair apparently thinking this was a three week course, and the look he had on his face when the octogenarian told him he was not sure he had enough time left to teach him.

I mentioned that incident a couple of times, once here, and again here.

Repartee wrote:

Somebody send this guy a copy of Gran Torino. Sheesh.

Thanks for the spoiler alert! I guess that's a Clint Eastwood film I can cross off of my list of films to see... 
 

In the 35 years I've been repairing typewriters, I'm STILL learning things--even on the most familiar of machines.  Whoever said this wasn't a three-week course said a mouthful.  When I started out, I was destroying as many as I was repairing.  I'd pick up a few tricks and my ratio of fixed to unfixable increased in favor of the fixed.  It took years to do this, and even now there have been a few that have defied me.  I have one now--a Dutch-made Remington Travel-Riter--Ol' Jumpy.  This one always skips a few spaces--especially at the end of a line.  I have several theories, like a tired spring in the escapement mechanism.  Haven't gotten around to retensioning it by removing a few of the coils yet.  But this thing jumps spaces here and there--hence the name Ol' Jumpy."  But again, this is no three-week course.  As long as you're fixing typewriters, you're still in school.  Maybe that's why I'm still in it.