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Comic Sans typeball designed to work with the IBM Selectric typewriters

printables.com

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Re: Comic Sans typeball designed to work with the IBM Selectric typewriters

#22

Post by mbreese »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #3

> I have not yet printed and tested this exact model! Sadly that sums up the 3D printable scene perfectly. So many times I’v seen someone creating X for Y but they don’t have Y to test it but “it should work”.

Amazingly, I think you’re right, but not for (negative) the reasons you state.

I see the 3D printing scene a remix culture where you’re supposed to try new things. If you want something to work exactly for your situation, you might have to do a little work yourself.

In this case, here we have an idea of making new typeballs for IBM typewriters. Here is one post where someone is playing with the idea. At the top of the page, there is a link to a GitHub page for you to adapt it as you see fit.

But then there’s also a link to a new page: https://selectricrescue.org/ where someone makes many more varieties, also with code for you to try yourself.

I see 3d printing much like the world of early open source coding. Sometimes you get a completed project that works out of the box. But often, you’ll have to tinker and adapt it to your exact hardware. Once a new 3d model is shown to be viable, it can be mixed and matched to make something new!

Re: Comic Sans typeball designed to work with the IBM Selectric typewriters

#23

Post by mbreese »

treetalker wrote: post #21

Dave Hayden of Austin Selectric Rescue is working on several type elements for the Selectric II: https://selectricrescue.org/ As I understand, the recent IBM Plex Mono face has been requested too.

It’s even the first link on this page. In addition to Comic Sans, he’s also made a font ball for Papyrus!

I can’t imagine using any of these (even when typewriters were king), but I love that they exist.

Re: Comic Sans typeball designed to work with the IBM Selectric typewriters

#24

Post by chiph »

voxadam wrote: post #4

Bill Hammack (engineerguy) has an excellent video on the IBM Selectric titled IBM Selectric Typewriter & its digital to analogue converter .[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCNenhcvpw

One of the Teletypes I used to work on had an eccentric-driven Wiffletree to position the typebox. This was necessary because of it's high speed[0] to decode the ASCII character set (it wasn't a Baudot machine). The selector cam at the end of the machine would do the serial-to-parallel conversion, then clutches would rotate the eccentrics powering the wiffletree to select the character.

If you look at the ASCII chart [1] you can select a character via binary tree - the Wiffletree being a mechanical equivalent.

[0] For a Teletype

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#/media/File:USASCII_code...

Re: Comic Sans typeball designed to work with the IBM Selectric typewriters

#28

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

cluckindan wrote: post #5
thrownawaysz wrote: post #3

> I have not yet printed and tested this exact model! Sadly that sums up the 3D printable scene perfectly. So many times I’v seen someone creating X for Y but they don’t have Y to test it but “it should work”.

It’s not far fetched though. With careful design, prints often do work on the first try.

The article says "I tested a previous revision", so this isn't the first go around.

Re: Comic Sans typeball designed to work with the IBM Selectric typewriters

#29

Post by alnwlsn »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #3

> I have not yet printed and tested this exact model! Sadly that sums up the 3D printable scene perfectly. So many times I’v seen someone creating X for Y but they don’t have Y to test it but “it should work”.

I have, along with some other ones I created from different fonts. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kXnsvYfaF4&t=2160s (it was an aside to a longer Selectric project I did; this typeball project came out around the same time so I decided to make a few of them).

Watching this back, it partially works but some of the letters clearly need their positions adjusted, and some of them seem to have trouble imprinting fully on the page. That's besides the fact that the proportional fonts look pretty weird when printed monospaced.

I didn't really go further with this because the resin printed balls didn't hold up very well. A slot near the hole would always break open, and then the ball would spin freely instead of being indexed like it was supposed to. These days I've pretty much abandoned home resin printing entirely since it is extremely messy, and I've never been able to make parts with it that weren't ridiculously brittle, even with the supposedly "strong" or "tough" resins.

I've used commercial resin prints that Shapeways/Xometry/PCBWAY have and they are a lot tougher, so maybe they would work well.

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