Родом из Расселвилля: Сэм Фримен открыл мастерскую по ремонту винтажных пишущих машинок

Russellville native finds niche in typewriter repair business Published 10:56 am Monday, August 24, 2026 For Sam Freeman, older things are better. As an example, Freeman has started Barren River Typewriter, a new business in Bowling Green housed on Lovers Lane that services and sells the vintage writing machines. “There’s just something romantic about a typewriter,” Freeman told the Daily News inside his workshop. “I don’t know what it is, yet every single one I’ve worked on I’ve fallen in love with.” Barren River Typewriter started up this summer. Freeman has promoted his business through Facebook, sharing photos of machines he works on. A black Remington Model 5 was the first one that Freeman, a native of Russellville, worked on. The machine was used by his grandfather during World War II, while he was serving in the Pacific theater. Initially, Freeman planned to restore the Remington only, but he came across an Olympia that his grandfather purchased for Freeman’s aunt when she was in college. In Freeman’s words the Olympia, which can type in plain text and cursive, is the “Mercedes Benz of typewriters.” “These would be the only typewriters I would not sell,” he said. Restoring the vintage writing machines was a hobby that Freeman found worthwhile and relaxing, since it means less time spent staring into a screen. He estimates he has sold around a dozen machines in the couple-months he has been going, but estimates he has worked on dozens more. “I’ve had homesteaders that are interested in them because they want to do newsletters, somebody was putting a cookbook together and they wanted one to put all their recipes together,” he said, adding that he sold one to an Amish child who wanted to write letters. Ink ribbon replacements, removing dried ink from the keys and cleaning the machine’s carriage are common repairs done on typewriters. While some machines that Freeman receives are not salvageable, the most common causes of issues in old typewriters are, curiously, eraser shavings. “Just about every single typewriter I get into has eraser shavings in it,” he said. He believes this is due to typists using pencil erasers on written drafts, with small pieces of the eraser falling off and landing inside the typewriter, clogging it up. ” … They’re in every machine.” Freeman only services mechanical typewriters, since the market for repairs to electronic typewriters in his experience is almost nonexistent. Mechanical writing machines were phased out from normal use in the 1980s, as the rise of computers and word processors replaced typewriters. Given their age, there are some issues that arise when working on the machines. Instruction books on repairs are almost nonexistent, parts are not always easy to find, and the sheer number of companies that built typewriters back in the day means that some machines operate differently from others. “You don’t really know what somebody’s bringing in,” Freeman said. “It might be a typewriter I’ve never seen before, and so it takes me a little bit to get to know it and get to know its different features before I start working on it.” As the business gets up and running, Freeman hopes to start doing live streams where people can ask questions about typewriters. He summed up his views on typewriters, saying it is a distraction-free exercise. “It does one thing and it does it really well,” he said. “There’s no distractions, and there’s no pop-ups, and there’s not all this other stuff coming at you.”