Austin Selectric Rescue

finding loving homes for stray IBM Selectric typewriters


Store down for now, back soon I hope

26 MAR 2026

After a frustrating winter of not being able to produce reliable type balls things were starting to look up again as the weather got warmer.. and then goimagine.com decided to close up shop. I took a quick look at the options available for moving the store but didn't see anything that would be a quick migration, and I'm feeling a little overwhelmed right now with my day job and everything else going on. My todo list keeps getting longer while my energy and motivation are shrinking.

I did finally test all of the balls I'd printed over the winter, though, and threw out the fails--well over half of them. Here's what survived the cull:

I thought I knew what was causing the reliability problem but after typing out and measuring nearly 200 balls my theories fell apart and I don't feel like I'm any closer to figuring out what's going wrong. But the weather's plenty warm enough for printing again, so I'll start the factory back up and we'll see how it goes. Once I've got some inventory built up and some free time I'll see what I can do to get a store running again. In the mean time, feel free to email and I'll see if I have any of the type balls you're looking for and we can do PayPal or Venmo or whatever. It just might take me a while to respond--again, lots to do and little energy for it at the moment..