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Super common gray and green 51ish QDL just went for 189 bucks. Someone bid 10 times in the last minutes of the auction, driving it up from 44 to 189 and they were still outbid by an earlier bidder. It was a very squeaky clean one, but that's $150 more than usual.
Maybe someone knew I wanted it for Christmas and got it for me?
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I had this Torpedo on my watch list because I like shiny black lacquered things, like typewriters and cameras.
=13px
This is just silly.
Phil Forrest
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Jeeze Louise...at that price of $ 10K USD...I would expect it to have been the personal machine of Kiaser Wilhelm II before he died in 1941.
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Either its a pre-Christmas rush or the good old days are over. Everything I look at is going for +50 to 100% more than what it did a few months ago. And these aren't highly desirable ones either, just common functional units.
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yeah. I recently saw that the $1000 Facit was relisted.
No more $7 typewriters for us.
Phil Forrest
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The relisting is actually a good sign in my opinion. It means that at least part of this recent trend is something other than a real rise in price among real buyers. But it seems like the other more subtle rise among previously run of the mill machines may be more real.
I was ok with gambling 35 bucks including shipping on something that might not pan out, but
I'm not terribly interested in gambling twice that on an untested goodwill unit.
Phil_F_NM wrote:
yeah. I recently saw that the $1000 Facit was relisted.
No more $7 typewriters for us.
Phil Forrest
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This run-of-the-mill Olympia SM3 is up to $ 685 USD with 7 hours still remaining for bidding.
It is described as "for repairs"...whatever the heck that means.
For about the same price, you can get a fully restored/rebuilt machine with new platen and other rubber from Darwin Raymond out of CO State.
Guess that saying of "you cannot fix stupid" must apply here to some bidders on SGW.
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well its still happening, so it wasn't a pre-Christmas bubble.
I'm sad.
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I am curious what the story is behind the really wild auctions on Shop Goodwill. It seems to have been going on for a while and is not just limited to typewriters. The same thing is occurring in numerous categories, as I have seen it discussed on message boards for other genres of collecting.
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I don't know about other types of auctions but I have wondered if there was a recent movie, special, or other kind of recent typewriter publicity that caused the sudden surge in prices even in common machines. It seems to sudden to have occurred out of a natural growth of interest.