Got a number of balls with them but not the Bookface 
how do you know it's the bookface ball we're looking for? are you 100% sure that it is a match?
By comparing this:
with this:
That last image I found on the website of a "Museum" right here:
http://selectric.org/selectric/index.htmlDone some experimenting and there is some bad and some good news.
The bad:
- the extra balls didn't fit, and I remembered reading that there were more modern balls (for the Selectric III series) which contain more letters. They have their names printed in yellow on top of the ball and indeed all the 4 extra balls have this.
- only one of the machines actually works. It made more noise than I had expected but it silenced a bit after a while. I thought there would only be a fan in there, but as I read there is actually a motor and some pretty complex (binary !) mechanics in there.....a miracle that it still works ( or not, judging on the build quality).
The other one is as dead as there is no power applied....at least there is still the ball from that one
- they smell like you'd expect them to smell, like smokey 70's offices !
The good:
- one works !
- it is possible to adjust the force of the strike which is EXCELLENT for our goal
- the machine has a mechanism meant for stencils, which simply means it lifts the ribbon out of the way so that the bare ball (heheh) strikes the paper/label, which is ALSO excellent for us (no need to remove the ribbon. Amazingly the ribbon works still !!!
- first testing show very very promissing ( I will make a scan)
- the mechanism has no problems at all with the labels. The only "drawback" is that it's impossible to "print" on the lower part of a label, but on the Atari's it's not needed.
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It will be pretty hard to do the exact positioning of the letters on the labels, but not impossible, will require some testing with paper print-outs first.
The way of using the ball only that I had first thought about can be ruled out right away: Impossible to do with some decent lining out AND it's already to hit at the right letter.....
Will scan some examples and post a bit later.
Now, we need a Bookface ball !
