There’s this Marine Green VACUUM-FIL that I’ve had here entirely too long due to a basic error of stupidity, viz., the misplacing of the pen’s blind cap.
The blind cap found and the pen’s filler restored, the owner will soon be receiving a gorgeous writing instrument back into the fold.
That’s a good thing. But what’s interesting about the pen, other than its utter gorgeositudinousness, is that it was produced very early in Sheaffer’s 15-year love affair with the plunger filler. Things hadn’t yet been standardized. Oh, goodie.
The pen is oversize. This means that the plunger gasket’s outer diameter is big, and so is the backing washer that keeps the gasket from flipping backward too far on the downstroke. That’s only to be expected. But the nut is also bigger than the usual size, and its shelf, the shelf that locates the gasket on center, is bigger, too. Which means that the lovely set of standard-size punches that Francis Goossens made for me doesn’t have a punch the right size for the gasket’s center hole. So I had to turn a punch on the lathe.
There’s more. The shaft packing is also oversize. Its diameter is larger than that of the eventual standard packing, and it’s also longer. Scratch the nice Viton® O-rings that we all use to replace the packing. I had to make a custom packing replacement.
Did I say it’s all oversize? Oops, not quite. The plunger shaft was 0.073” in diameter, not the 0.081” that became standard. That custom packing replacement wouldn’t work with the smaller shaft, so I ended up replacing the shaft with one of standard diameter. Fortunately, the threading on the ends of the shaft didn’t change, so all the pen’s bits and pieces did go back together. And I gotta tell you, this filler sucks. I mean it really sucks — about 2.8 cc of ink. It’s sort of like the Henry Rifle, which Confederate soldiers called “That damn Yankee rifle they load on Sunday and fire all week.”
Which all makes me very happy that I too am the owner of an oversize Vacuum-Fil pen, this one bearing the WASP brand:
This pen also led an interesting life on the bench at the Nashua Pen Spa, about which I blogged a while back.
So, umm, is bigger always better? Some pen companies appear to think so, at least when they’re marketing to Americans. Consider the Pilot Vanishing Point (aka Capless). U.S. dealers don’t have access to the thinner, lighter décimo (upper, weighs 20.9 g) or Fermo; all we can get is the fatter, heavier Vanishing Point (lower, weighs 30.9 g).
Okay, so it come in 18 standard color choices plus periodic limited editions. But that’s a choice that isn’t a choice for people who find the bulkier pen uncomfortable. I wonder if a letter-writing campaign to Pilot USA in Connecticut would have any effect.
I suppose I’m actually stretching things a bit, given the span of more than 20 years between the release dates these two pens, but I just had to come up with an excuse to show off my new Waterman Concorde (1970s) and Philéas (1990s).
The Philéas is shorter, at least it is when it’s posted, but guess which pen is fatter. And guess which one wasn’t sold in the U.S. On the other hand, we don’t get the Kultur (a Philéas with less of the glittery stuff and with no brass weight shoved up into the barrel) either, so go figure. Fat, ostentatious, and overweight, yeah, that’s us.
Anyway, a month ago I didn’t know what a Waterman Concorde was. But my friend Christof did, and it turned out that he had three Concordes (actually two and a half, considering the condition of one of them) that he didn’t want. They’re all mine now, and I’ve harvested the clip and section assembly from one of the good ones in order to put the hitherto dead black one back into service. I’ll spring the other functional one on you later...
