There are some feelings that you just can’t recreate. And the supporters of the IBM Selectric spring keyboards neither the flex spring design nor the modern mechanical keyboard can replicate the distinct feel of this legendary ball type. In the 60s and 70s, the Selectric was a staple in the office, but the rise of PCs and daisy wheel forced the machine into retirement by 1986. This did not stop people from buying, refurbishing and sale Electricians, however. The problem is that IBM stopped making the one printing element that makes these typewriters so special. You can find type balls online (including variants claiming to be used another never been 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 project to 3D print Selectric balls. Khakadey another github and shared the files on printing formsaccording to Khakadey. But beware: these final versions have not been tested or printed by their creator. Earlier this month, Ettinger shared a video on mastodon the previous version in action, recognizing that some 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 jamming 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 to understand why people are still attached to Selectrics, this video is on youtube from keyboard enthusiast Chyrosran22 can help).
Ettinger type balls follow the same spirit, offering Comic Sans (drawing from Jessie England’s book Typewriter Comic Sans 2014), and Windows Tifinagh keyboard layout V Ebrima Font and Windows’ Cherokee Nation keyboard layout V digohveli font. Each ball requires a “bent wire” as they say in the Printables pages, or a Selectric ball clamp, a design also available through printing formsto work.
Building on earlier work
Ettinger believes these handmade golf balls are better than previous attempts thanks to the work Steve Malikoff, who made an ambitious but imperfect DIY ball using OpenSCAD. In 2020, Malikoff detailed efforts to 3D print his printed ball with an FDM printer, but struggled to make sharp edges on plastic rather than metal like 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 noted Khakadey, 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. Those devoted to the legend may now have a new way to keep their machines alive – or at least a handy job to lean on.
We look forward to someone printing and testing Ettinger’s models to make sure they estimate IBM machines correctly. 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.
