Sun No. 2 Standard
A cheap machine, built to be cheap, and much more interesting for it. The Sun Typewriter Company sold the No. 2 at a price the big standards couldn’t touch — the original advertising I have puts it at $40 in 1901 — and nearly every design decision in it follows from that constraint. It is, as far as I know, the first typewriter built with sheet metal in place of an all-cast frame, and the mechanism is stripped down to match.
This one came to me broken in the way Suns usually break, and getting it typing again took a machine shop, a packet of obsolete screws, and a new ink roller.
| Manufacturer | Sun |
|---|---|
| Model | No. 2 Standard |
| Year | 1901-07 |
| Serial No. | 8278 |
| Size | Portable |
| Drive | Manual |
| Color | Black |
| Typeface | Standard |
| Pitch | 10 |
| Layout | 3 Bank |
| Status | Cleaned and restored, fully functional |
| Acquired | 1 July 2022 |
Condition
Cleaned and restored, and fully functional. It has had the most work of anything here — a fractured casting repaired at a machine shop, obsolete screws replaced, the ink roller assembly rebuilt, new rubber.
That’s the opposite of how the Hammond Model 1 was treated, and deliberately so. The Hammond arrived working, so it was left original and uncleaned; original is a condition you can only lose once. The Sun arrived with a broken shift casting and would not work at all. Once a machine is already apart to fix something structural, there’s no argument for putting it back dirty.
Gallery
Type specimen
The broken shift casting
The machine arrived with a fractured casting: the forked section that guides a shaft up and down to shift the platen between figures and capitals. It’s a known weak point on these — a thin fork carrying a working load, in a casting chosen because it was cheap to produce.
I stripped the machine down and isolated the casting, then took it to Gonsel’s Machine Shop in Oakland. They machined the fracture faces down flat, drilled and tapped, and attached stock material to rebuild the fork. It’s a repair rather than a replacement — there is no supply of new Sun castings — and the machine shifts properly again.
Screws you cannot buy
Several screws on the machine were bent. Replacing them turned out to be the fiddliest part of the job, because the Sun uses a 6-36 thread — a pitch that has long since fallen out of use.
I found new old stock on eBay and bought a large packet to use two of them. They happened to match the originals in head shape as well as thread: domed head, slotted drive. For a machine where correctness of small parts is most of what separates a restoration from a repair, that was luck rather than planning.
The inking system
The Sun doesn’t use a ribbon. It inks from rollers, and the arrangement is unusual even by the standards of ribbonless machines: a small ink roller that does the work, and a larger reserve roller feeding it. In operation the small roller bounces up against the large one, taking a fresh charge of ink each time.
The original assembly was riveted in place, which is the cheap-to-produce decision showing up again — riveted parts aren’t meant to be serviced. I drilled out the riveted shaft, removed the perished original roller, and fitted a new IR40-type ink roller, retained with a small threaded screw and nut instead of a rivet. That makes it serviceable next time, which the factory never intended.
The machine is fully functional now.
The escapement
The other thing worth pointing at is how the escapement is triggered. A conventional typewriter uses a universal bar — a single bar that every typebar strikes on its way to the platen, which then trips the escapement once per keystroke. The Sun does without it: each typebar trips the escapement directly. Fewer parts, less to go wrong, and cheaper to build. It’s the same logic as the sheet metal frame, applied to the mechanism.
Base and cover
The machine is mounted on its wooden base and has its original metal cover. Either survives on its own often enough; having both, together, with the machine they came with is uncommon — covers got separated, bases got broken up, and neither was worth keeping once the machine stopped being used.
Rubber
New feed rollers and feet, 3D printed in TPU. Original rubber on a machine this age is invariably hardened past use, and TPU is a workable substitute at the sizes involved.
These aren’t type elements — they’re ordinary consumable rubber parts that happen to be easier to print than to source. There’s a growing pile of printed typewriter parts like these that has nothing to do with type, and may get written up separately one day.
In operation
A ribbonless machine with a bouncing ink roller is much easier to understand moving than described.