A few days ago, a big bag o’ pens came to the head of the queue. Jim, to whom the lot fell, dug through the bag and abstracted three, count ’em THREE, straight-cap Onotos. One was a virtual duplicate of the one in my collection, with an over-under feed.

Now this, you may or may not know, was the first pattern De La Rue produced, beginning in about 1906. But the primitive feed really doesn’t control flow very well, and in fairly short order Onoto the Pen began sporting a more ordinary underfeed, and the other two pens in that lot were of this variety.

Jim is an experienced restorer of Sheaffer plunger fillers, but until that day he had never restored an Onoto’s filler. Now the cool thing is, the mechanisms are very much alike. But there are just enough differences that I had to take Jim through it. The first one I did. The second one we did together. The third one Jim did. Yee-haw, the dude knows his stuff!

As years went by, the pens’ external design changed to keep up with fashion. The interior, on the other hand, never changed. Almost. Oh, there were a couple of implementation revisions, such as replacing a groove cut into the end of the plunger’s backing head with a washer having a hole the right size, or eliminating the threading from the end of the plunger onto which the ink shut-off fits, but this is all peanuts. And now Jim can handle these things — which is an official Good Thing.

So what does this have to do with equines?

I’ve owned a couple of underfeed Onotos, including this BCHR specimen:

That black beauty was a thoroughbred among pens, perfectly crafted and wonderful to handle. But not quite wonderful enough: it never felt like an extension of my hand. So when an opportunity presented, I put that pony on the block and transferred my affection to a younger critter.

This one was also remarkably elegant, a real dressage-class high-stepper, but as tricked out as it was, and as well behaved as it was, it wasn’t my pen. No matter its sweet two-tone Nº 5 XF flexie or its lovely balance, it just never tripped my trigger the way I’d hoped it would.

So, while I was digging through the Onoto parts box, I unearthed a more “ordinary” pen that I thought had potential, sort of like a quarter horse colt that’s been spending his days in the mud. I straightened the semiflex stub, and I restored the filler, and I prettied the pen’s hide up with some polishin’ and a good rubdown, and whaddya know, I’m in love all over again.

This lovely little number, an Onoto 5500, looks strikingly like a British Parker, perhaps a Victory, from about the same period. The clip has “Parker-style washer” written all over it despite its TDLR imprint, the celluloid makes me think Burgundy Duofold, and the nib, oh BABY! I foddered her with a dose of Diamine Crimson, and I’m here to tell ya, me and this pony gonna ride some TRAIL together.

So here I am on my third Onoto (not counting the great-granddaddy up there, who spends most of his time out to pasture). Three different ponies, each with its own silhouette and ride, but all three were bred in the same stable. From the same sire, even. And none of ’em ever rode hard and put up wet.