That moment when you realize that binder full of useless Olympia parts price lists for 1969 also has an Engineering Bulletin that details the *exact serial number when the paint and plastic on the Olympia models changed*… :D
This info is now incorporated into the Olympia Serial Number Page at TWDB. I also fixed a nonsensical serial number entry for SGE-30/40 in 1967 that has been a persistent typo in every OMEF edition I have from 1971-1980. (clearly a typo because the 1967 serial number is lower than the 1966 one, and the 66 and 68 numbers make sense in terms of yearly production capacity.) I pulled the new, more reasonable number for 1967 from the 1973 NOMDA Age List.
https://typewriterdatabase.com/olympia.61.typewriter-serial-number-database
Very nice find.
Thank you for posting it.
Ted, your scholarship continues to amaze me. Thank you for keeping up the good work.
Eureka!
My 1968 SM9 sn: 3,402,592 has dark grey keys, but the shift keys and carriage knob end caps are distinctly grass-green instead of turquoise. In the TWDB there is another SM9 with the same green parts also from 1968, sn: 3,416,632. I found a similar examples in the 1968 SM8’s at sn: 3422165, 3408467, 3433006, 3444979, and 3499116. Maybe the turquoise was a mixture of blue and green plastics (or pigments) and they ran out of blue first before the scheduled transition to dark grey…?