In My Collection

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(This article is copied from a posting I made February 25, 2006, on the message board at Pentrace: The site for fountain pens that write.)

I’ve been sorting through some boxes of parts I bought a couple of years ago, trying to get them into some sort of order so I can actually find parts when I need them. One of the interesting things that turned up in these boxes was this pen:

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 upon taking the cap off, is a Parker Lucky Curve. (There are still traces of the barrel imprint.) When I unscrewed the section, I found that it had no sac nipple. Cool, I thought, an eyedropper Lucky Curve! Then the remnants of the sac fell out of the barrel:

So I looked at the back of the barrel, and whaddya know, there was a blind cap there. No button or pressure bar, but this was without question a very early Parker button filler, made sometime between 1912, when Parker started making button fillers, and about 1916, when they combined the button filler with the screw-cap feature of the Jack-Knife Safety pen. What to do, what to do? I took the pen all apart, and here’s the section all alone:

The pen was pretty much a waste that way. I decided to restore the section by making a new nipple so I could assemble a working pen. First, I bored out the back of the section using a drill the size 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. This was a trial-and-error business; I got it down close and then test-fitted the parts:

To get them to go together, I ended up taking another 0.005" (0.125 mm) off the outside of the nipple. When the parts fitted together, I cut the nipple to length:

I shellacked the nipple 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. Since there is no way anybody would ever mistake this pen for one that hadn’t faded and been reblackened, I did the G-10 thing on it and put it all together with a sac. Here’s the final result:

The really cool part is that I can use this pen as an illustration in an upcoming article for my Web site — and I didn’t borrow it, so I don’t have to give it back when I’m done.

The information in this article is as accurate as possible, but you should not take it as absolutely authoritative.

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