1969 Hermes 3000 #3550546

It's a french keyboard layout, as I got it out of France.

This being the only Hermes 3000 that I have ever been able to type upon, means of course, that I have only experienced the feel of this machine. It could very well be, that the touch of earlier iterations behaves another way, yet so far, the rather harsh changing of the positions of the line spacing selector has me wondered why they did not opt for a cleverer design. On my Olympia SM3 and Erika M, I can make the selector click up and down, indeed a great satisfaction, without making the machine move an inch. Here it seems to me, that I have to convice the mechansim to allow me a change in my writing, which isn't always granted... And since the left and right cover of the carriage are made out of a flimsy and brittle plastic, both are, naturally, cracked, which I have done my best to glue and secure as not to break into little pieces of sadness, it is counterintuitive to try and get a tighter hold onto their sides in order to manipulate the line spacing selector. It doesn't help much either, that the one, one-and-a-half and two line selection markings are made out of the same piece as the cover and thus the same shade of green, hence the need to double check whether you have chosen the proper positioning.

You might be able to tell from the slight color difference, that both platen knobs are 3D printed. The second printing attempt turned out to be astonishingly accurate, I haven't yet felt the need to improve upon them just yet.