Tiger Calculator H68-21 / H62-20
This is possibly one of the calculators that was most surprising to me. I was aware of the very late efforts of the Tiger calculating machine company to improve their products, and one of the things most appealing to me was that by the use of various coloured plastics, you could get their latest model in different colours. You could find machines in light and dark grey, in green, in yellow, light brown, and in a very appealing aqua colour.I had decided against going for the full colour range, but instead wanted two machines. However, one of them definitely needed to be aqua.
So I ended up buying two machines from Japan, a light grey one, and an aqua one. To my surprise, when they arrived, they were different machines. Part of the same family, obviously, but still entirely different (up to an extra position in the result register for the later machine), and the aqua thus is not really a colour option for the earlier model. From to a serial number list that can be found on rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com, I can deduce that my "older" machine is the model H62-20, probably designed in 1962, but this one was built at the beginning of 1967. The new model H68-21, was probably designed in 1968, and makes even further use of injection moulding and plastic. Where the earlier machine consists of a shell that is screwed together from the sides with a large number of screws, The new model has a one-piece cover that is characteristically screwed to the machine frame with 4 philips head screws, from the bottom.
In addition, and this is in my opinion an absolute first, the whole mechanism was thoroughly redesigned for the 1970s, and the use of plastic further extended into areas where they had never been used before. Where the geared sector drum of the H62 model consists of press-formed brass and steel parts, the H68 model introduces the first, and in my opinion only, ratchet wheel drum with ...plastic parts. The yellow and white caps on the setting levers are in fact not caps - the entire setting disks are made out of white and yellow plastic. In addition, the comma rails are also made out of plastic. Very futuristic, and a vision of what might have been had it not been for the advent of electronics.
Tiger H62 moveable ratchet wheels:
Tiger H68:
They are operationally identical. There's an indicator on the front plate showing whether the machine counts positive or negative, operated by the first crank turn after a carriage reset, a large plastic left-right tabbing handle with a grip on the bottom which allows to shift the carriage freely when compressed, a smaller plastic lever to the left for backtransfer, a thumb button below the main crank for input reset, and finally a small steel lever on the right side of the machine for freeing the direction lock if necessary.
Now for some pictures - first the H62-20
Note how the screw heads are sprayed an identical grey - nice touch!
And then the H68-21
And finally the two siblings together
