I fix mechanical typewriters at one bench in Leipzig and write up each job while the machine is still in pieces, because a repair I cannot describe afterwards is a repair I only half understood.

Slate Typewriters is one bench, two vices, a tray of small screwdrivers and about eleven square metres of a former back room in the west of Leipzig. I started in the autumn of 2019 with a machine that would not space properly and a library book, and I have been taking machines apart ever since. Most of what comes through the door is a portable from between 1930 and 1975, usually German or Czech, occasionally Italian, occasionally something wide and heavy that two people have to carry up the stairs. I service them, I get them typing again, and the ones nobody claims eventually go on to somebody who will use them.

Nothing here is a manual and nothing here is instruction. It is a shop book. I write a job up while the machine is still open on the mat, because by the following week I have convinced myself the fix was neater than it was. The entries carry the measurements I actually took, the adjustments that did not hold, and in two cases the damage I did myself and had to put right. Where I guessed, the entry says I guessed. I have no training in this beyond what the bench has taught me, and I would rather that were obvious than hidden.

I do not name the machines by maker. Partly that is because model names attract arguments about which factory did what in which year, and I am not qualified to settle those; partly it is because the mechanisms repeat across makers and the maker's badge tells you less than the design of the escapement does. So a machine here is a year, a carriage width, a segment type and a weight. If you know the machines you will recognise most of them anyway. If you do not, the description is the part that matters.