Selectrics for adoption

• coming soon!

Custom type elements for Selectric I/II

News:
• 27 MAR 24 Still working on getting quality back to where we were. Here's an update.

• 15 JAN 23 The store is in vacation mode for the immediate future while I re-tune the CAD file and wait for warmer, resin printer-friendly, weather (and get over this awful bout of RSV)

• 30 DEC 24 We've fixed another couple design flaws

• 17 SEP 23 The first batch that went out was recalled due to a design flaw. I've sent out replacements and everything looks good!

• Important! How to use the ball clip so you don't donk up your rotate/tilt tapes

• Selectric III balls are under development

Vogue is a classic art deco typeface used on Royal typewriters dating back to the 1920s. The ball was generated from a custom-built TTF font traced from samples found online: TTF file

JetBrains Mono is a modern typeface developed for coding, but it makes a great typewriter font as well. (And looks pretty good on web pages, I think.) Source

Senatorial was used on some Olympia typewriters in the 60s; it is also known as Cubic, or just "that robot font". This version was traced from type specimens found online: TTF file

I haven't found much information about it online, but Spencerian Script appears to date to the 1960s and was used on some Royal typewriters. I've tweaked the font a bit, raising the lower case z descender so that it doesn't interfere with the t below it on the ball. Source

Comic Sans is a monospace version of that font. You know the one. Source

And of course, there's Papyrus.

The original custom typeball project that this work is descended from was an effort to create an APL ball for an I/O Selectric, so here it is in both Correspondence and PTT/BCD layouts. Source

Finally, here's the latest version of the OpenSCAD file I used to generate the 3D models for these type balls. It contains a lot of tuning parameters tweaked to make reliable prints on my SLA printer, a Creality Halot One. My hope was that anyone would be able to generate an STL file from this and send it to a printing service like Shapeways, but I tried it and the ball I got back was unusable. :( Maybe you'll have better luck.