B.C. rock singer spends free time as a typewriter mechanic

Sawatsky Sign-Off: Typewriter Guy Adam finds out why a B.C. musician’s hobby is fixing hundreds of old typewriters.

PORT MOODY, B.C. — The story behind Brendan Raftery’s garage being filled with typewriters begins at the back of it.

“This is the very first machine,” Brendan says, and points to a bright yellow typewriter.

It’s one of two typewriters that Brendan bought decades ago on a whim.

“I thought, ‘Wow!’ Those are kind of neat and old,” Brendan says. He found them at a yard sale, priced at $5 each. “I bet I could get them working.”

He painted that first one the same colour as his car at that time, after figuring out how to fix it on his own.

“The analogue is what I really liked,” Brendan says.

But before he could figure out the mechanical puzzle of the second typewriter, Brendan began touring the world as the lead singer of the AC/DC tribute band, BC/DC.

“It’s great!” Brendan says of performing for decades on stage. “And it just keeps going.”

Expect for when the pandemic stopped everything. And that’s when Brendan started tinkering with that second typewriter, 27 years after the first one.

“I just love the mechanics of it” Brendan smiles. “And now I got about 160!”

Brendan refurbished every one of the unique typewriters that fill the shelves surrounding his garage. His work is accompanied by a soundtrack of, not classic rock, but songs from whatever year the typewriter was built.

The collection ranges from a typewriter made for wars that can fold compact during combat—“the guys would be in the trenches typing out messages or news articles”—to a comical typewriter painted with the Twitter logo—“Tweets took a lot longer to get to where they were going and then you had to wait for a reply in the mail.”

Brendan says his favourite typewriter is called a Torpedo 18-B.

“It types like a hot knife through butter,” he smiles, before revealing that he rarely ever types on any of them.

“I’m not a typist,” Brendan laughs. “It’s like a car mechanic who doesn’t drive!”

Instead, Brendan shares his typewriters at public family events or lends dozens of his typewriters to high school libraries, so young people can get aquatinted with the antiquated.

“This brings you back to technology that isn’t distracting,” Brendan says.

Instead, these machines — designed to be fixed rather than discarded — invite you to focus and compose something wonderful with words.

“They are full of stories,” Brendan smiles. “They’re full of whatever is in your head.”

Which is why, Brendan says, they’re all worth saving.

“They’re not going to make any more typewriters,” Brendan smiles. “There’s a finite amount of them and I want to try to keep them alive.”