Elegant ugly

As soon as the non-essential shops were allowed to open again, we went straight out to poke around in the junk shops. Only one thing on my mind of course and here’s what I found…

A mere £220 and you still need to fix it up

Slightly less on the price tag , but still a big fat no thanks

Are you kidding me? Lockdown has been messing with everyone’s minds

Seems like a reliable hulk but too big to carry up the hill

In the same junk shop as the Adler. £22, for an SM 9? that’s more like it. Knocked it down to £20, not noticing the dodgy ancient platen knob fix until I got it home.

I also discovered this little issue, no wonder the carriage was a bit sluggish in the shop. What you can’t see in this picture is the hideous tangle behind the mainspring. Those teeth on the edge of the mainspring drum are really dangerous to fingers. With extreme caution I gave the drawband some slack with one hand and used a pair of tweezers to free it from the jaws of death and reposition back into place.

Which just left one more twist to sort. Fortunately the SM9 has a nifty hook arrangement on the end of the drawband.

These alcohol mini-wipes have been really useful for disinfecting phones and public touch-screen tills and ticket machines. Turns out they’re good for getting rid of old tippex on rubber too.

Say “aaahhhh”

Ok, you’ll do. Pretty cool for an ugly office machine. Owned by one person, a Mr French of Hastings, and purchased for the princely sum of £61.56 inc tax, in August, 1974

I love these original packing details!

Factory export ticket! Tucked in under the plastic form in the case since 1974.

Here’s that awful platen knob fix. Mr French! What were you thinking?! Some kind of epoxy gunk which oozed all over the place. Not sure I want to tackle a remedy for this at the moment. I can live with the wonk for now.