Public Service Announcement: Here’s your gentle maintenance reminder to clean the slugs on your typewriter to keep your type fresh and crisp.

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich

I had been considering getting a custom punch made several times, but never looked to see if one already existed commercially. Today, while doing a 5 minute peruse of the thrift store, there it was!

When you use as many tabbed index card dividers as I do, this can be incredibly useful. It’s just the right size for doing 1/3 cut tabs on 4″ x 6″ index cards.

Acquired at Acts Thrift Store on October 7, 2025 for $2.50.

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich

Sorry Ron, but that is more likely a late 40s Underwood SS than an Underwood 5. But I too want to type up every word I know.

 

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich

Thinking about the current storage capacity of my card index collection, I made a back-of-the-index-card calculation:  

172,000 index cards * 150 words / card [average maximum, using front only] * 1,200 bytes / 150 words [rough average with Unicode encoding] * 1 kb / 1024 bytes * 1MB/1024 kb = approximately 200 MB of text storage

Having it well organized and indexed… Priceless.

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich