- Fearless
- Sep 3, 2003
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DRINK MORE MOXIE
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Crossposting from the Restoration Thread after being directed here by Megabound. TL;DR is that I got into restoring vintage fountain pens and am very much enjoying it! I make no claims to being highly informed as to dates or whatnot-- I am basing what I know off of the observations of people that I know who are much better informed and what I can piece together from whatever is to be gleaned from the internet.
I do a lot of writing by hand in various notebooks and journals both professionally and in support of various hobbies that I engage in. Back during my undergrad, a good friend introduced me to fountain pens and eventually I wound up coming into possession of a selection of vintage Parker, Waterman's and Esterbrook fountain pens that belonged to some relatives that had a really huge impact on my life and from there I chose to focus my fountain pen collection on older pens. The trouble is that most older pens that survive to the present day are usually not in a usable state (with some very notable exceptions-- seventy year old Parker 51 Aerometrics and Esterbrook J series pens can often be found only needing a cleaning and a cosmetic restoration) and so I wound up getting pulled into the hive of angst and snobbery that is fountain pen restoration! Here are some of the restorations that I have handled personally:
A note about how I approach restoration, especially the cosmetic aspects: I look at the pens I am restoring as objects with their own history-- fountain pen nibs do conform to the hand that writes with them over time, leaving in the world a very tangible trace of a person who is long gone. I think it is important to retain the "story" of the pen as an object, but also balance that with trying to also bring the pen closer to the vision that the original designers had when it was created. In essence, I do not eradicate damage entirely, but rather to obscure it so that it is less prominent. It's still there, and visible if you really look, but it no longer immediately draws the eye. This also reduces material and detail loss from aggressive sanding meant to entirely hide damage but is fundamentally a conscious choice made and not the result of an inattentive or slapdash restoration.
The first pen I restored, a 1927-29 (I think) Parker Duofold. This is effectively the beginning of the Duofold line, which is one of Parker's most enduring products. This pen, in this colour, was the pen that positioned Parker as a market leader-- it was huge and vibrant at a time where most fountain pens were black or ostentatiously embellished with gold or silver. This is the Senior model, and it is very large indeed, coming in at 140mm in length capped. Despite the huge size, it is surprisingly well balanced! The black end caps are ebonite-- a hard rubber that will oxidize over time and turn brown. Mine was no exception and while some people like the bronzed/turd look of oxidized ebonite, I personally do not like writing with something that smells like farts when it gets warmed by my hand. The most surefire way to remove the oxides is by sanding, but this will destroy any chasing, knurling or other engraved details and also result in material loss. I did some research and learned that the black colouring came from dye in the first place and more research revealed that a lot of leather dyes work exceedingly well for the purpose. I also do leatherworking, so I have some high quality black dye that I used on the caps-- and lo, they darkened greatly. The dye does not come off on the hand once it is dry, does not interfere with future de-oxidation treatments and is also reversible. I needed to install a new pressure bar (the internal mechanism that allows the pen to draw ink into its internal reservoir) and a new ink sac (the internal reservoir). It came with a massive 14k gold nib that seems to be something like a broad or even a stub and it is quite wet.
Here's restoration number 2, a mid-late 1940s Canadian Waterman's Dauntless 302. You can get a rough approximation of the age by the markings and the shape of the lever-- the big, silly canoe paddle levers that are missing a box seem to be a later cost-cutting measure and I suspect a reaction to the end of Sheaffer's original patent on the lever fill system that Waterman sidestepped by putting its levers into little boxes. By this point, Waterman's had lost its dominant position in the market but was still producing quality pens with fantastic nibs. This pen is no exception-- it required a new ink sack but the nib was in stellar shape and is the usual buttery smooth and flexible nib you would expect from a Waterman, even a relatively late and lower end model like this one. I have another version of this same pen, albeit in a slightly darker blue (which may be just a result of a fossilized ink sac staining the barrel) that belonged to a great uncle and which is far and away the best nib in my collection-- handily beating the brakes off of the likes of Montblanc. Both have wet, flexible medium nibs and both are lovely writers.
 
Next up is a Wahl Oxford, a pen marketed at university students in the 20s-early 1940s. Getting a firm date on this thing is tricky because it seems to be a non-standard variation on the Special version of the pen-- it has features like the gold cap band that do not mesh with the nickel plated clip and lever. It also has a steel nib. During this time period, steel nibs could vary dramatically in quality-- a lot of makers hadn't figured out the right alloys to make very smooth nibs so steel versions, especially cheap ones, could be downright terrible to write with. This pen is an exception to that trend and its nib is excellent. While not overly long, it is a pretty chunky pen and fits my hand well. I bought this pen in a big job lot of various mangled and neglected fountain pens and a bunch of higher end ballpoints. One of the latter was a Sheaffer ballpoint pen and pencil set that I gave to a client that I was doing some other restoration work for-- he is now retired but used to do photography for advertising and by a fluke he shot the original photos used in advertising that very pen and pencil set-- I wouldn't have believed it, but he had the original photographs from his portfolio as proof! Anyways, this Oxford and a grey Esterbrook J were the only fountain pen survivors from that lot. The others provided an array of recoverable parts, but were otherwise junked. The Oxford alone is worth the price that I paid and as far as I am concerned is one of the hidden gems in my collection.
  
Here is an early 1940s Waterman's Starlet 352V, the smaller version of the larger Stalwart 352. The Starlet/Stalwart were the up-market companions to the Dauntless 302-- distinguished mainly by having gold plated components but using the same excellent nibs. This pen was previously owned by someone who made a habit of gnawing on the end of their pen like a beaver with an oral fixation. I wound up filling in the various pits and gnaw marks with super glue, letting it fully cure and then sanding and polishing it down smooth. I was very careful on this restoration to keep aggressive abrasives away from the gold plated components-- these I buffed with extremely fine polishing cloth to restore their shine, but otherwise preserved the plating. The pen is pretty, but fairly small. Despite this, it is comfortable to write with even with my big hands. The grey colour works surprisingly well with the gold components-- it kind of reminds me of veins of gold in stone.
 
This is a small WASP-- the depression-era, economy sub-brand produced by Sheaffer. I suspect this pen is a victim of a previous restoration attempt-- it came to me highly polished and with absolutely no trace of branding or stamping on the barrel or cap other than some decorative elements in the clip and the nib-- which was a Sheaffer. This pen needed a new ink sac and the 14k nib still needs some work-- it is a stub, but also far too wet and also prone to leaking. At the moment, I swapped out the feed and nib for a modern Jinhao replacement. It's not ideal, but it works. Despite being aimed at thrift-minded buyers, the WASP pens are built to a very high standard and give no ground in terms of overall feel or quality to regular Sheaffers.
Despite what the picture says, this is a 1934 Parker Parkette with its matching pencil. The Parkette was Parker's economy line that was in production alongside the much higher end Duofold and Vacumatic models. Fairly unusually for a Parker, these are lever-fillers. Much like the WASPs, they give no ground in terms of overall quality to the main Parker models-- they are well built, attractive and despite being an economy model could come equipped with splendid little 14k gold nibs. This was another pen that only required replacing the ink sac and some polishing.
I don't know if it is by accident or perhaps some kind of subconscious bias but my collection has a lot of Parkers in it. In particular I've picked up several Parker 51s (though all of them have been either previously restored or are still functional and only needed cosmetic restoration) and a bunch of Vacumatics. I have restored three of the latter, though have had an assist from a fellow collector as I lack the specialized tools needed to restore them. Anyways, the Parker Vacumatic was the flagship offering from the company from 1932 to the debut of the Aerometric Parker 51s in 1948 (though some Vac production persisted to the mid-50s in Canada). These were expensive pens-- if memory serves, the price for one in the first couple of years was around $10 though this dropped to around $5 by the start of the Second World War. Regardless, that's a lot of money during the Depression and even during the War-- your average able seaman in the Royal Canadian Navy earned around $1.25 a day through most of the first half of the 1940s. The Vacumatic replaced the Duofold and Challenger lines and exists in a staggering array of variants, sizes and colours. Juniors are the smaller framed versions of the pen, and in Canada a unique version of the junior was produced that has the length of the larger Standard or Senior models but the thinner width of the juniors. Vacumatics were also produced with a number of technical innovations. First is the Vacumatic fill system. Cynics might argue that it is a essentially a convoluted bulb filler. There is some truth to it in that any pen with a rubber ink sac that is somehow squeezed to fill itself by means of an artificially produced vacuum is a bulb filler. The big difference is that the Vacumatic uses a rubber diaphragm that snugs into the inside of the barre of the pen to generate the vacuum that fills the pen rather than a bulb that fits over one end of the pen's section and is protected by a removable barrel. The fill system is also designed the way it is to take advantage of new materials being used in making pen barrels: Parker had partnered with Dupont in coming up with celluloid pen bodies that had alternating layers of coloured and transparent plastic. In the Vacumatics, this meant that one could look at the barrel of the pen and instantly see how much ink was in it. Finally, the feed system is designed in such a way that it is less prone to leaking at altitude or when laid on its side-- the pen's feed has a long breather tube that serves as a mechanism by which the pressure in the ink reservoir can equalize as altitude changes. Parker didn't really nail this until the 51, but the Vacumatic is still a big step in the right direction.
Anyways, here are the Vacs that I have restored. The first image is a pair of juniors-- the shorter one is a mid-30s Shadow Wave and the longer is a Canadian Junior, probably from the mid 40s. The colour of both is Gold Pearl. The Canadian Junior needed a new diaphragm, feed and nib-- it had been a victim of a previous restoration attempt that obliterated a lot of the markings and broke the feed off while probably trying to pull the nib out. It also required some clean up work in terms of polish. The Shadow Wave was also a victim of a previous restoration attempt-- someone tried to remove the section from the barrel and applied so much heat that it actually damaged both-- I had to fill in the damaged areas with CA glue and then carefully polish them. It also required a new diaphragm and assembly. Both have smooth medium nibs and while the Canadian Junior has a fairly stiff nib (as is common with Vacs), the Shadow Wave has one of the relatively rare flexible Vacumatic nibs and is consequently much wetter.
I was recently given a rare Vacumatic Senior Maxima-- the largest of the Vacumatic models. These pens were not made in huge numbers and are highly sought after-- mine is from the late 1930s and they can command prices between $500 and $1000 CAD. It was a gift from a client who knew that I wanted one of these monsters for my collection but there was a twist: though it was complete the pen was also a victim of a previous restoration attempt (I sense a trend here...) and someone had applied too many ooga-doogas to the barrel while trying to disassemble the pen and broke the barrel cleanly in half. The good news is that the separation occurred along the lines between layers in the barrel (more or less). The transparency of Vacumatic barrels will also diminish over time and use-- celluloid is quite porous and will absorb residue from dark inks, slowly rendering the barrels very dark or near opaque. I tried polishing this barrel as best as I could but it made no difference to the transparency. I knew that to repair the pen I was going to have to glue the barrel halves together somehow (using acetone or MEK to fuse the plastic, or epoxy). I also knew that for the repair to be worth a drat, it was going to have to be reinforced from the inside via a sleeve in the barrel. Clear acrylic tube could be used but to get any meaningful strength, you lose a lot of capacity in the ink reservoir. The other option, which is far stronger, is aluminum tube. You lose whatever ability you had to see your ink level in the pen, but the repair will be utterly bomb proof. I also figured that if I polished the tube to a mirror shine, the tube will reflect light that would be otherwise absorbed by the barrel and make it even more brilliant. So naturally, I chose the aluminum and used epoxy to seal the rod into the halves of the barrel, a shitload of filling and sanding and polishing and then reassembly... and here we go:
It's got a really nice, smooth medium nib that's not too wet and is just a joy to write with. The aluminum reinforcement has added a warm amber/red glow to the barrel in places that really goes well with the overall colour of the pen and if I get more Vacs damaged in this way this is how I will be repairing them going forward. The repair to the broken barrel is no longer visible, but one can feel it-- again, I left that scar as a reminder of this pen's story just as I have on other pens that I have worked on.
Fearless fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Apr 12, 2024
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Apr 12, 2024 03:57
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May 10, 2024 12:58
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- Fearless
- Sep 3, 2003
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DRINK MORE MOXIE
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Got something in direct from Italy today, not a Delta, but Delta-adjacent
I might've said "Holy poo poo" when I opened the box because holy poo poo that's pretty.
That is indeed a very pretty pen! Congratulations!
I finished working on that big Conklin Endura this evening. The cap was the recipient of most of my attention-- chiefly, it needed a big chip repaired and I needed to colour match the chip. Well, here are the results:
Here's a shot of the damage to the rim, along with colour samples that I provided the client with for his approval. We settled on mix of two different Vallejo Game Colour and Model Air paints that when combined with the resin, matched the colour of the pen extremely closely.
This is the repaired section after some sanding, shaping, gap filling, more sanding and polishing. I am very pleased with the match on the colour and was also able to polish away the worst of the discoloration on the cap band as well.
As mentioned, a previous botched attempt at replacing the clip cracked the cap. I stabilized the crack but left it visible-- the goal is to bring the pen closer to its designer's original vision while also preserving indicators of its age and life.
And here are a couple of shots of the Endura all done. It originally had blue accent bands-- I was able to find a matching colour almost effortlessly and restore those and I am glad I did. It wasn't in the original request from the client but when I saw them from the reference material provided and pointed out that I could replace them easily, the client was happy to accept. I wouldn't exactly call a big orange pen drab as such, but the accent bands do add quite a lot to it.
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Apr 18, 2024 05:34
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May 10, 2024 12:58
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- Fearless
- Sep 3, 2003
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DRINK MORE MOXIE
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For clarity: this is how I would do the repair, and I am not definitively stating that this is how the repair should be done. I'd be inclined to flow a thin CA glue into the crack, clamp it down with a dentist's clamp (coated in some kind of release agent, of course) and once it's set up go about sanding down and polishing the repair site.
Make sure you clean the area in need of repair though-- if there is any ink buildup it can interfere with an effective repair and also make the repair more visible.
Speaking of Vacumatics, here's something I just finished repairing the nib on:
A double-jeweled Senior Maxima in Azure stripe, with the original box and matching pencil.
The rarest Vacumatic ever made, and only the second one I've ever handled. Pretty much the Holy Grail for Vac collectors. A little worn, but the transparency is still good end to end.
Beautiful! Is that yours?
Fearless fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Apr 24, 2024
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Apr 24, 2024 18:36
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Apr 12, 2024 03:57
