Even Littler Typewriter Jobs

At the time I posted on "Little Typewriter Jobs" (on February 19) I was happily putting to one side an undertaking to service a Blue Blue (Torpedo) 18 portable. As I worked on fixing machines from the "Yours Faithfully" exhibition at the Museum of Australian Democracy, and an unduly troublesome Brother portable, I kept looking at the Blue Bird and thinking, "The longer I have that here, the more I like it." The Blue Bird had been brought into my typewriter workshop by a woman from Goulburn. The moment I first saw it I could tell it had been kept in very good condition, and required very little in the way of servicing. To my astonishment, the owner declared that her husband had found it, in its case, in a rubbish bin. Oh, that I should ever be so lucky! Having typed on the Blue Bird for the three weeks it was here, my high opinion of the Torpedo 18 as the best portable I've ever used was only enhanced. Sadly, it has now gone home, sparklingly cleaned up, to its rightful (and very fortunate) owner.
         After that, I had a little bit of luck myself. A year or so ago I was given this Olivetti Lexikon 80, in a dreadful state. I took it apart, cleaned it up, and repainted and reassembled it. But it was missing several keytops, and I used, as a temporary measure, the white keytops off a much later model Olivetti. It looked OK, but I always felt I needed to find, somehow, somewhere, a full set of keytops from a Lexikon 80. And finally I did: