The red De Luxe Hundred Year Pen and the two Emblem Pens I wrote about this past Sunday are, as you might expect, safely ensconced in the photographic version of my collection. Here’s what they look like there:
And “George” has chosen to reveal his identity by complaining about not getting credit. That’s fine; I have no problem with his unmasking himself as the Vac Quack — but I do hope he’ll appreciate that I chose not to name him not because I wanted to deny him the credit for being part of that four-sided pen deal but rather because I try to respect people’s privacy.
But that was then and this is now. Today saw a couple of delightful European pens and an exceptional American come across my workbench along with the usual riff-raff.
After I reground two modern pens’ nibs to 0.4-mm cursive italics and one to a 0.4-mm stub, I turned to the first of the three goodies. It was a Stellor safety, a fairly typical — and very nice — Continental that needed recorking of its shaft seal and a fairly minor repair to its guts in order that the nib actually extend when you turn the knob. Making a new cork is a routine matter of chucking a champagne cork into the lathe, drilling a center hole the diameter of the shaft and a little deeper than the desired length for the finished seal, and turning the outside down to fit the bore in the barrel end cap. Wax the cork, put the pen back together, and Bob’s your uncle. For the guts repair, I turned a short length of styrene tubing down to the appropriate diameter to replace the pin that was missing, and whaddya know! It works!
I always enjoy working on safeties, but this pen was extra special because it belongd to my client’s great-uncle. The inscription reads:
“LA FENICE„
ASSICURAZIONI - VITA -
Not being Italian, I don’t know what this means, but sentimental value gets me every time; the most rewarding thing I do with pens is to give someone back a piece of his heritage, in working order and looking spiffy. Oh, all right, I’ll admit it, I did brighten up the hard rubber barrel end cap and actuating knob; they were all gone to olive, and I restored their original color. I think the client will be a very happy camper. And I’m one, too — after all, I got to play with the pen and take its portrait.
Next in line was a very sweet Matador 811. At least, it would have been sweet had the piston not leaked and then frozen at the proximal end of its travel. Getting the pen apart wasn’t hard, but it did call for a little extra care because I had to disassemble the piston mechanism before I could remove it to dislodge that stuck piston. What I found when the piston came out surprised me, but I suppose it shouldn’t have. Someone had attempted to repair the leaking problem by cutting two 1/8” lengths of some sort of flexible plastic tubing and installing them in place of the original dead cork. Not cool. Manufacture and installation of another cork solved this pen’s leak, after which I swapped it end for end and smoothed the scalpel-like nib.
What a really sweet pen this turns out to be! Its nib is a remarkably good extra-fine steel flexie (dating the pen to the period of World War II in Germany), and the pen is just about the perfect size. And the transparent areas of the barrel are nice and clear.
The third of today’s cool pens was a Sheaffer’s Model 47, the first-year version of the Crest. These pens aren’t common, but they’re not rare, either — unless they have sterling caps, as this one does.
This pen belongs to a friend, who showed it to me and lamented the pretzel job that had been done on the clip: bent sideways, several kinks along its length, and a couple of wicked ugly scratch marks running diagonally across it almost like the edges of a baldric. Silly me, I again forgot to take a “before” picture, but here’s the “after”:
Gosh, I hope it won’t disappoint my friend.
Post scriptum
Hello, Cathy, are you there?
I did a dumb thing. I was half asleep when I read your comment, and it looked like spam, so I deleted it. My apologies. In the light of day, I appreciate your having taken the time to translate what's on the Italian pen. Will you post it again, please?