Valiant wrote:

Ouch, that must have hurt!

 ​It certainly hurt my back just carrying to and from the car. I still have to officially weigh it, but I don't need a scale to tell me that it's one of the heaviest machines in my collection, a real shelf sagger, and when that massive carriage returns it looks like an artillery barrel blowing back after firing a round.

Just bought my second typewriter in under a week that I've purchased for less than the price of a new ribbon. It was a $5 gamble because the listing showed it underneath a clouded-plastic typewriter cover, and the description didn't indicate the make or model. It simply said "Old typewriter in good working condition, needs new ribbon".

The gamble payed off. It was indeed in good working condition, and when I got it home I was able to identify it as...



...an Imperial Model 80! This thing takes A3 paper and being an office typewriter, it's HUGE. It's a bit of an ugly ducking I'll admit, but like the Brutalist architecture movement, it has its own kind of functional charm. Well worth the $5 anyway.

I'm only saying $5 for the benefit of our American friends. It was actually $7 Australian, which roughly translates to $5 US. Anyway I saw the listing on Gumtree, which is essentially an Australian eBay for local pickups. I figure it's a nominal fee charged by people who want to get rid of their typewriters to free up space but don't like the idea of losing something for nothing.

Hey, if it's only $7 then that's what I'm going to pay, no questions asked!

beak wrote:

That Torpedo may have been 'De-nazified' in 1947.

 That was one of my thoughts too, there are certainly clues to suggest it, but I would never state it definitively as there isn't any actual proof; for all we know it was maybe only French accent keys that were added in place of other characters, or the machine was pulled from the rubble of a destroyed building and refurbished. I've seen one too many collectors (I'm certainly not suggesting that you're one of them) emphatically state, as if it was a proven fact, that they owned a 'de-Nazified' model just because the paper legend for the 3 key was different or that the slug appeared to have been resoldered. It drives me nuts.
 

From what I can remember (and it has been some time since I have seen either a Series One or Two Imperial 80), they are similar in appearance. The S1 has an all-over smooth off-white enamel finish, whilst the S2 (as shown in the picture) is textured sand over black.  The S2 should have a full-width printed aluminium strip just above the keyboard with the makers name on a light brown background.  It was not uncommon for these to fall off.  A similar aluminium strip on the back of the carriage has the Royal Warrant (means that the compnay are official suppliers to the British royal family) and Imperial logo on a matt black background.  The S1 has a central logo on a brushed aluminium background which reads 'LI (Litton Industries logo) IMPERIAL 80' This is on the ribbon cover.  It think that the only major difference is that the carriage is removeable by the typist on the S1, by means of a simplified version of the spring-loaded latching arrangement that all the previous models had.  On the S2, the springs were removed, meaning that an engineer had to use a screwdriver to release the latches before the carriage would come off.  It was a very sad last model for Imperial.  Obviously the bean-counters at Litton (by now the parent company) had decreed that the machine should be made as cheaply as possible - and it showed.  The fit and finish were awful.  Carriage end castings and ribbon covers came loose and rattled alarmingly when the machines were only a few years old.  They were mainly sold to the British government, who had been buying Imperial typewriters since the 1930's and maybe didn't realise at first how the product had changed for the worse.  Once the Imperial factory in Leicester had closed for good in 1975, the government switched to buying German Olympias !