I like the Eversharp CA ballpoint. Never mind that it never worked right; it was a sharp dresser, especially when fitted out with Fifth Avenue kit, and I like it so much that a while back I developed a method for converting it to accept Parker refills.

The trick works for both kinds of CAs, Fifth Avenue and Skyline. But waitaminnit, there’s a third kind. It’s the retractable one, shown here retracted and extended. (Yes, it really is longer when retracted; the whole barrel moves to extend the point.)

And it has a completely different refill. You can’t convert it using the procedure I so carefully worked out. And that, as you probably know, is for me an intolerable situation — but not an irremediable one.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages! Here, for the first time anywhere, on this planet or any other, the ORIGINAL CELEBRATED, the ONE, the ONLY…

Is the foregoing sufficiently obvious that you can guess what kind of music I’m listening to on this gorgeous, sunny, open-windows 78-degree (Fahrenheit), spring day?

First things first. We need to disassemble the pen. Fortunately, no funny stuff is needed because Eversharp designed it to be taken apart for refill replacement. Here it is all laid out on the table:

The cap pulls off, and then you just unscrew the retracting mechanism from the barrel and dump the refill out. The refill looks pretty straightforward. We’ll need to save the spring and that funky big hunk of aluminum on the back.

First, remove the spring.

The catch is that the spring has a death grip on the refill. In order to remove it, you need to expand its coils slightly. Instead of unscrewing it, then, turn it the “wrong” way, as if you were screwing it on. This loosens its grip, and you can simply pull it off.

Ideally, the aluminum thingie should just slip off, but of course it doesn’t. We need to take it off. But we also need to make it suitable for reuse with a refill that is unlikely to be the same diameter as the original. (The original is 5/32” in diameter, while most modern replacement refills are smaller, at 1/8” in diameter. This is a good thing, as it turns out.) We need a lathe.

Step 1 is to cut the refill away from the aluminum piece.

With just the aluminum piece (and a very short length of tube stuck inside it) remaining, drill a 1/8” hole 1/4“ deep. If you run the feed gently by hand, you’ll feel the drill bottom out against the bottom of the hole in the aluminum piece.

The final step is to clean up any roughness on the front face of the tiny piece of tube that remains pressed into the aluminum piece.

We now have a reusable back end for our replacement refill. For the refill, we’ll start with an ordinary blister-packed Paper Mate refill from an office superstore; I used a Nº 56407 refill, with black ink and a medium point. Because it will be necessary to cut the refill shorter, we have to drive the back-end plug farther down the length of the tube, as shown here. The upper refill has its plug in the original location, while the lower refill’s plug has been moved to its new home.

It’s very easy to make this modification; you do, however, need a small-diameter drift punch or a suitable substitute therefor. To do this with only two hands, lay the punch on the workbench with its end fitted into the refill, and strike it repeatedly with a jeweler’s hammer that you slide across the work surface.

The plug is far enough down when you can measure just 3” from its back surface to the tip of the refill. Now cut off the back end of the refill, leaving a finished length of 31/16”. With round-nose pliers, pinch the tube wall slightly in two or three places at the back end of the refill; this will cause the overall diameter to expand slightly so that when you slip the piece of aluminum onto the refill it will stay.

Attach the aluminum piece, and you’re ready for the spring. Screw the smaller end of the spring onto the front of the refill for a couple of turns, to lock it securely onto the ears that would normally rest against a spring in a Paper Mate pen. You can see from the photo here how far you should go.

Reassemble your pen and write with it. When you extend the refill for writing, you will notice that the refill does not fill the opening in the pen barrel’s nose; there is a way to make it fit more attractively, but that’s a lot more work and not really necessary — so I didn’t bother to include it in this article.