(This page published September 1, 2022)
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Once upon a time, I was digging through a box of what I had cast aside as junkers or parts pens, and a miracle happened.
Pawing through a box like that is sort of like making an archaeological dig: sometimes you discover some unexpectedly interesting, if not necessarily showroom ready, artifacts. As significant or desirable vintage pens become less easy to find in the wild or more costly when bought from dealers or other collectors, some of these artifacts deserve more than a quick look and a flip into the trash. One such deserving artifact was this nibless pen that turned up in the box in question:
It’s actually a Frankenpen, as the cap shows very faint marks of chasing while the barrel doesn’t. (It was also somewhat more olive colored initially; I did some rubbing on it before I decided to start taking pictures.) It’s a cone-cap pen, and what it is, I discovered when I removed the cap and saw the feed, is a Parker Lucky Curve pen.
After making this discovery, I verified it by locating traces of the badly worn barrel imprint. When I unscrewed the section, I found that it had no sac nipple. This “junker” pen looked like an eyedropper Lucky Curve, and although it was not in collectible condition it was still worth restoring. Then the remnants of a sac fell out of the barrel. A closer look at the back end of the section revealed that it had once had a sac nipple. The sac wasn’t just someone’s idea that seemed right at the time; the pen was not an eyedropper filler at all, and when I looked at the back of the barrel, I found a blind cap there. (I hadn’t noticed it earlier because it was smooth, not knurled like a later Jack-Knife Safety or Duofold blindcap, and it fit so well that the joint was easy to miss.) The pen had no button or pressure bar, but this was without question a very early Parker button filler, a Safety-Sealed pen made sometime between about 1912, when Parker started making button fillers, and about 1916, when Parker engineers combined the button filler with the screw-cap feature of the Jack-Knife Safety pen. To a history and technology buff like me, this pen was more worth saving than I had initially thought. I took it completely apart, and here’s the section by itself:
Obviously, the pen was no good that way. I decided to restore the section by making a new sac nipple. First, I bored out the back of the section using a drill matching the diameter I wanted the nipple to be:
Then I made a new nipple by drilling out a length of hard rubber rod to match the inside diameter of the section and turning the outside to match my bore in the back of the section. When the parts fitted together, I cut the nipple to length, shellacked it into the section, cleaned out the bore, and assembled the feed into the section with a suitable Parker nib:
Then I dug through my parts and turned up a nice bright nickeled Parker button and a Parker pressure bar of the proper length. I was not able to locate a first-generation Davison-style soldered button/pressure bar assembly, but later parts were better than no parts at all. Since there was no way anybody would ever mistake this pen for one that hadn’t faded and been reblackened, I used Giovanni Abrate’s G-10 on it. (Were I doing this restoration today, I would Hooverize the pen instead.) Then I reassembled the pen with a new sac. Here’s the final result:
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