Post(Card)-A-Day 21: Drab but Drama Free - Olive Green Groma Kolibri

Really uncanny how the keys and the body are matching exactly, but it's grown on me.

This is the only one of the three to have a Swiss keyboard; the others came from Germany. I like having the French accents easily available, as well as the currency sign Fr. Also note the exclamation point key!

So the usual yardstick is a box of matches, but I just thought I'd also show that the height of the Groma Kolibri is roughly equivalent to the cap of a Lamy Safari pen :-)

In surprisingly good condition, all things considered. A lucky find.

And thus Groma Kolibri week on Retro Tech Geneva, February 14-21, comes to a close. Next up to be used for typecasts will be a couple of Hermes Babies, and then, over the weekend, an intriguing new portable that I am quite keen to feature on the blog...

Post(Card)-A-Day 16: Maroon Groma Kolibri

 

Looks like it's turning out to be Kolibri week on the blog! That is not such a bad thing.

Besides, this is a good opportunity to put up a few of the orange-background photos that this blog is known for :-)

Coming soon to an unscrupulous eBay auction near you! (It's been a while since I saw this, though, so perhaps the situation is getting better.)

Speaking of beautiful maroon typewriters, 'fess up, who won this stunning Continental? I sure hope it wasn't a keychopper, an option which the seller mentioned in the listing (tsk, tsk).

Thanks again for the swap, Georg! Hope you're enjoying the Everest K2 :).

NB: I am experimenting with eliminating word verification for comments entirely, since I have the option to delete undesirable ones and I am almost always online, anyway. I noticed that the word verification captchas on other blogs have gotten just about unbearable (two words, both rather hard to read) and I struggled trying to make a few comments this morning. 

So let's try going without the safety net for a week and see how it goes.

Post(Card)-A-Day 14: Typewriter Valentine - Groma Kolibri Luxus

So that first question mark should have been an exclamation mark, obviously. But I noticed the mistake after I'd already scanned it, so let's pretend it was intentional, as in: are you having a Happy Valentine's Day? I hope so!

Catching the very last rays of "magic hour" lighting. Red background is appropriate for today :-)

 

This Groma Kolibri Luxus is in fair shape overall, but a few mechanical quirks keep it from being a very reliable typer: the above-mentioned stiffness (which I'm not sure how to improve as I have read that oiling is a no-no), the smudged text it produces (I did clean the type slugs and the ribbon looks fine, so it's a bit of a mystery), and the fact that the carriage locks when the paper finger is down - unintended by the manufacturer, I'm sure, but there is something catching in the mechanism.

Still, I have enough drama-free typewriters that this Kolibri Luxus can be left to slack off a bit. Even if she's not pulling her weight in the writing department, she adds to the collection in other ways! Here is the Groma badge in the back.

And here, the DDR badge.

Composing this typecast. Took a while to get this one page done, and then she was packed off to a life of leisure. This is the sort of typewriter that I'd probably whip out if I wanted to show off just one machine to a newbie. As long as you're not actually typing on it, it looks amazing and will surely elicit some gasps of admiration.

 

The summer of Georg

Finding my way around the Kolibri. It's a lovely machine, and I'm so excited to have one at last (since the last one I purchased online arrived DOA). It writes fairly well, but a thorough cleaning and lubrication would not be out of place. All in good time.

So, there I was taking a stroll through a passageway in central Basel, and what should we find but...

The typewriters.ch shop window! Lovely, isn't it? I would have a hard time deciding which of my typewriters to give up for that long, but I think the Princess 300 makes a great representative of the genre (and also fits in nicely with my last post, ha!).

The Montana that, for eighty bucks, was just a little out of reach for us. Not that I'm complaining, though, it looks fairly ordinary and seems to take after the early Underwood portables.

 

Back at Georg's, I admired several highlights of his collection, including this handsome Stoewer Elite with beautifully-preserved decals. 

There was also a flatbed Royal No. 1, typing none the worse despite being almost a century old! Really quite remarkable. 

Entering the Schreibmaschinenmuseum - you can just see the floor to ceiling arrangement of typewriters, which are in every nook and cranny of this small space. Viewing every one of those would take hours, if not a whole day! Fortunately, most of the collection is very well documented on typewriters.ch, so you can read up ahead of your visit.

Neckermann Brilliant Junior, or Groma Kolibri (1950s)

Reading Richard's post about the patron saint of typewriter collectors, St. Vincent de Paul, which he composed on a beautiful Groma Kolibri, I was reminded of my own ill-fated attempts to procure one of these ultra-flat beauties. The Neckermann Brilliant Junior above is a Groma Kolibri, rebranded and sold by Neckermann (a large department store in Germany. This is pretty much the equivalent of Sears rebranding Smith Corona typewriters in the States.).

 Of the many typewriters I have purchased online and had shipped to me, this is the only one that didn't make it. How ironic that it should also be the smallest! Perhaps that has something to do with it. See how the bottom is no longer level? We think the right side was dropped heavily at some point, causing the hairline crack right under the left side of the space bar. That is actually broken. So sad! What has happened, and is beyond my technical knowledge to repair, is that the space bar and keys no longer move the carriage - it moves freely on its own, but the escapement is jammed somehow and pushing a key does not trigger a carriage movement like it should.

Couldn't have happened to a more handsome machine. The worst part of it is that this was the one machine I had delivered to a friend to save shipping costs (she lives in France and it's cheaper to send German purchases there as it's still in the EU whereas Switzerland is not), and so I have no idea of how it was packaged, as I asked her to discard the box and packing materials. I had not thought there would be cause for concern... in the past, everything has gone fine. Well, now I join the throngs of collectors with shipping horror stories.

Here is the case which, although in decent condition, cannot be recycled for another machine because it is much too small. The Groma/ Neckermann now lives its days as our display typewriter,  hoisted up on the bookshelf. It looks rather nice up there; but of course I would much prefer it to be functioning! I'm much too scared to try getting another, at least for a while, so this will remain as my only experience with the much-sought after Groma Kolibri, unless I come across one locally (fat chance!). Ah, well. Win some, lose some.