I've never come across a 'Personal-Riter', but it's clearly a variant of the Ten-Forty produced between '68 and '73 (which I do own - see below). First, it's a full-size portable and therefore bigger than a Skyriter. Manufactured in the Netherlands, I'd describe it as an average portable in terms of performance, but the reason I bought one was because I quite like its design. The machine's shell was made in Italy and was hyped as being stronger than the cast aluminum frame it surrounded. Given these shells are actually quite delicate - either originally or because the material has degraded over time - that claim is nonsense. The shell is made of Cycolac, a proprietary ABS compound produced by Borg-Warner. My machine has a couple of small cracks, and I've noted a lot of the other Ten-Forty models I've seen in person showed similar issues.

Given the Personal-Riter is a less common machine, and providing the shell was in good condition, I would certainly buy one. However, if I was looking for something more robust with arguably better typing performance, I'd opt for one of the 1950s x-Riter models: they all look fantastic to me and are great to type with.


 

The Ten Forty is related to the German Blue Bird / Torpedo,  Remington bought the Torpedo factory during the German economic crisis of the late 1920's with the intention of making it a Remington 'satellite' factory producing Remington clones.  It never worked out this way because the Torpedo factory made perfectly good designs of their own and there was a bit of resistance to Remington products in Germany.  Selling as Deutsche-Remington just didn't cut it.  So they left their subsidiary to their own devices since they were turning a profit.  This continued until about 1964 when Remington shut the German factory down and transferred production to Holland when the last vestiges of the portable model were cheapened into the Ten Forty, Holiday etc.  Even though it was the cheaper end of the market, it still had a lot of Torpedo DNA and of course, metric threads !  An examination of the ribbon mechanism shows that it is typical Torpedo and designed for the German DIN spool, even though many machines came fitted with an adaptor to take the Remington 'spool-less' ribbon.

Case fit photo...
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Sorry...had a "1961" typo in my post above...it should read a "1964". 

That was the time Remington took the machine to Holland for production and more and more plasticy changes.