Olivetti Lettera 32/35 Monster Truck Mashup! BRIIING YOUR CAMERAAA!

Siblings, Side by side, ready to be skinned.

Yep, the screws are all in the same places. I think it'll work!

nekkid!

Bottoms up! Could typewriter porn get any nastier?

A snuggly wuggly fit!

The best of both worlds: the Olivetti Lettera 32/35!

Seriously, though – other than the greater prevalence of plastic on the L35 guts and the lack of a touch control lever (useless on the L32 anyway) and mount points for the floorplate, the guts of these two machines is basically identical. Nothing really changed except the quality of the parts between 1964 and the mid-late 70’s. Well, and the bodies, of course.

Updated: October 25, 2018 — 11:00 pm

7 Comments

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  1. Wow, the Twolivetti! (See Richard’s coinage of the term Twolympia :-))

    I suppose the only complication is that it might not be possible to put the L35 guts in the L32 body, so you are left with a few spare parts…

    Good job, it came out very nicely. For added pizazz, you could spray paint the whole thing red! (Well, red is my go-to color, but we did paint a L35 red with very good results; I featured it on my blog in December.) The taupe color of the L35 is the perfect base for a paint job.

  2. I think the only complication in getting the L32 body onto the L35 guts is that the L35 spacebar is quite a bit larger than the L32 one, so the body doesn’t quite slip on. I’ll have to find some way of popping the space bar off then mounting the body and then putting the space bar back on. Then I’ll have a Lettera 35/32 Twolivetti as well as the Lettera 32/35! :D

    I did see your bright red L35 in December – that was my clue that painting it would probably not be a disaster, although I think I’ll stick to something close to the Lettera 32 blue that’s already on the paper table. I don’t mind painting up the L35 bits, but I want to try to keep the L32 bits original in case I want to swap them back someday. (:

  3. Ted, hope you didn’t have too many parts left over :-) That’s an inspired piece of work – worthy of Victor Frankenstein. Just by the by, sometimes your site fails to load for long-ish periods. You might not have noticed or be aware of that. Maybe you self-host and power down occasionally? Thought you’d like to know. I only noticed it over the last couple of days.

  4. A splendid Twolivetti. What a fun project!

  5. HI! Do you have a vid of how to take the Olivetti 32 apart? I’m planning to repaint mine.

    Thanks in advance

  6. I have looked at several Lettera 35i’s in the USA including the one I own, which I obtained New Old Stock, and they don’t have the Touch Control, or even the bar that the Touch Control attaches to. I am not sure when Olivetti started doing this, why, or what serials were effected, I am just mentioning it.

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