There are some feelings that you just can’t recreate. And for IBM Selectric aficionados, neither beam-spring keyboards , flex-spring designs, nor modern mechanical keyboards can replicate the distinct feel of this legendary printed ball. In the 60s and 70s the Selectric was a staple office product, but the rise in popularity of PCs and garlands forced the machine into retirement by 1986. However, that hasn’t stopped people from buying, rebuilding and selling Selectrics. The problem is that IBM stopped making the one printing element that makes these typewriters so special. You can find balls of the type on the Internet (including variants claimed to be used). and never used). ) and in shops of old electronic components. But you would save time and resources if you could make your own. It took someone years to find a way to make a 3D printable Selectric golf ball, but now someone claims to have it.
An artisan named Sam Ettinger recently shared his 3D printing project for Selectric balls on Hackaday and Github, and shared the files on Printables, according to Hackaday. But beware: these final versions have not been tested or printed by their creator. Earlier this month, Ettinger shared a video of the previous version of Mastodon in action, admitting that some of the letters could not be used.
The newer models are reportedly 0.2mm shorter to address this issue and adjust letter rotation as it was “offset 90 degrees”. Because of this, we cannot test how successful these models will be in real use.
Comic Sans and more
In addition to eliminating key sticking by moving away from old-school typewriters, one of the neatest features of the Selectric typewriters was the ability to change golf balls and change typewriter fonts and languages, from international languages to the APL programming language and scientific notation. (if you need more help understanding why people are still into Selectrics, this YouTube video from keyboard enthusiast Chyrosran22 might help).
Ettinger’s fontballs follow the same vein, offering Comic Sans (a 2014 Comic Sans typewriter drawing by Jesse England) as well as the Windows Tifinagh keyboard layout in Ebrima font and the Windows Cherokee Nation keyboard layout in Digohweli font. Each ball requires a “bent wire”to work, says the Printables pages, or a Selectric ball clamp, a design also available through Printables.
Building on earlier work
Ettinger believes these do-it-yourself golf balls are better than earlier attempts thanks to the work of Steve Malikoff, who created an ambitious but imperfect DIY ball using OpenSCAD. In 2020, Malikoff detailed efforts to 3D print a ball of his own type using an FDM printer, but struggled to make sharp edges on plastic rather than metal as in the original IBM golf balls.
Ettinger, referring to the resin printer’s capabilities, said he changed “most of”the dimensions of the Malikoff ball and how the characters are generated for the automated process. As Hackaday points out, a 3D printed ball is not as durable as metal balls. But beggars cannot choose.
With its advanced capabilities, from error correction to the introduction of magnetic recording technology (hello, early electronic word processing!), you can’t have a real conversation about how we got to modern computing data without a nod to the Selectric. For those still loyal to the legend, there may now be a new way to keep their machines alive – or at least a handy job to lean on.
We look forward to seeing someone actually print and test Ettinger’s models to see if they fit IBM machines. What’s more, people could use Ettinger’s work to create more DIY ball options, from additional fonts to more languages and maybe even better designs. Long live the golf ball.