Dear Polcelain, by all means try to post some pictures of the machine.  I am sure that someone on here can help identify it.

Please create a new thread in the Portables sub-forum. This thread is dedicated to new member introductions.

My fifth post, and I finally remembered to come in here.   I got my first typewriter a month ago out of necessity--needed to get off the computer and unplug, for a variety of reasons--and discovered that a typewriter carries a certain ... infection with it.  Which is, you get one, and then you want another one.

So about a month ago, I bought a pretty blue Smith Corona Super Sterling from the '60s, which serves my typing needs wonderfully. (Really, she's a sporty little thing--drives like a dream, if she does eventually need her platen recoated.)  But along the way of choosing the right typewriter--and finding this forum--and poking around way too much on Ebay--I got hooked on the idea of restoring a real "oldie." 

The Underwood 5 is supposed to show up later this week. I do not know what I am doing, but plan to enjoy the learning curve. She's a mess, but not a (complete) bucket of rust.  And the keychoppers will never have her now. *rubs hands together* 

beak wrote:

- would love to know more about why you wanted to unplug.

Well, there's a few physical things.  I've found a typewriter is better for my posture, and easier on my eyes--which I suspected would be the case.  The other is that in writing fiction on a computer, it's very easy to scroll up and down to rework the same material endlessly.  You don't have to retype a whole page, you merely change a sentence or a paragraph and create a new file.  For some people (like me), this leads to bad writing habits, because we end up trying to perfect what we've done without ever moving ahead. Thus, it becomes impossible to produce a first draft that would provide the material for more effective revisions. 

The typewriter almost completely eliminates this problem. It's too much work for me to change a page more than once or twice at most.  I find myself scribbling a few notes in the margins and moving on.  I don't look back constantly at what I've written, because I can't "scroll up." I can't play games on the computer and pretend I'm "thinking about it."  I don't hop over to the Internet by opening a web browser every time I want to look up something--I make a note and deal with it later.  Technologically, I've had to move backwards to move ahead.

And, it's working wonderfully.
 

Welcome to the forum Evan (tinkeringtypist) !  Your Imperial GC has a cork platen because after four years of war, we had pretty well run out of rubber.  If it is a 1944 model, there will be a lot of parts in black that would have been chromium plated before the war.  Right at the end of the war, Imperial were so hard up for rubber that they even started to fit cork feet.  The cork feet do not stand up to wear very well, but the cork platen is excellent and will have retained its elasticity after all these years.  A rubber platen would have gone rock-hard by now of course.