What’s going on at Richard Binder • Fountain Pens

More funky stuff

Fri, 3 Jul 2009 07:54:43 -0400

One of the best things about running a pen restoration business is the opportunity to see so many interesting pens as they come coasting through the Nashua Pen Spa. The past week or so has produced some fascinating specimens, one of which actually came along with a parts buy and has therefore moved in for an extended residence. Let’s look at that one first.

This NOS ULTRAFLEX isn’t funky because it’s a German safety; after all, I have maybe a dozen other safeties from various countries, including Germany. Its claim to funkiness arises from its date of manufacture. Now we were all taught that retracting eyedropper-filling safeties were a phenomenon that had its day around the turn of the 20th century and was on the way out by the ‘30s. (Waterman was still making artists’ safeties in the ‘30s, but everybody knows that Waterman was a bit backward about newfangled stuff anyway.) Well, folks, this pen is funky because, in the grand scheme of vintage pens, it’s virtually a modern pen. It was made almost certainly after Camelot came crashing down. What, somebody besides Parker date-codes their pens? Nope. Simple detective work (a reading of the instruction sheet packaged in the box with the pen) discovered that the Ropex Co., Inc., imported the pen recently enough that there’s a ZIP Code in the company’s address. ZIP Codes went into use on July 1, 1963. Hence, my pen was made after that date (which was less than 5 months before Oswald pulled the trigger).
Oh, yes, they did sell the pen as an “India Ink Fountain Pen,” i.e., an artists’ pen. Even so, I think Francis C. Brown would have been pleased to know that his invention was still making money more than 65 years after he got his patent. Heck, I bought the pen new in the box, so it was still making money 101 years after...
The coolest thing about this pen is that it didn’t work. When I bought it, the mechanism was jammed. I had to perform some bone sculpture on the helix to get the nib to extend or retract. So even if it weren’t mine, this would be a cool pen.
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the hatchet was king. Yup, this is one of Holland’s very early hatchet fillers, a Nº 4 FOUNT-FILLER.

It’s interesting how designs evolve. A later hatchet filler, this 72V from my collection, shows the addition of an aluminum “box” around the lever, apparently to strengthen the barrel.

My surmise about the box’s purpose derives from the fact that the earlier pen shows a crack at the distal end of the hatchet slot.
Perhaps the coolest thing about the Nº 4 pen is its clip. Bearing a 1907 patent date, the clip is a Holland design that mounts to the pen like the bail on a bucket: the two transverse “arms” sticking out the sides wrap around and are bent to snap into holes on the sides of the cap. There is a spring fastened to the clip at its middle, bearing down under the paddle end so that the clip ball presses against the cap. Nice, simple, and effective.
Okay, so why is this next thing funky?

It’s not, really, at least not if you’re as ancient as I am. This is a reissue of the Scripto K780 Classic mechanical pencils I bought every September when it came time to trudge back to school after the all-too-brief summer hiatus that had seemed endless in June. Along with new Foremost jeans (Penney’s house brand, featuring a roomier cut in the crotch and extra-dark indigo dye), a 3-ring binder wtih 3-to-the-inch ruled paper, a new 12-inch ruler, a Pink Pearl eraser, and a shiny box of 32 fresh Crayolas (64 if you were rich), those Scripto pencils were de rigeur at the Whittier Elementary School. The only difference between the pencils I got then and this one is that this one was made in Mexico, not the good ol’ U.S. of A. Oh, and they had red erasers back then. Ah, nostalgia…

My one favorite color combination...

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:22:01 -0400

If you think you might be suffering from déjà vu, don’t worry. I posted this piece on the Fountain Pen Network a couple of days ago — but since readers of my blog and FPNers are intersecting sets, not congruent sets, I decided to post again here. To business, then.
We all have colors we like, and most of us have one that we particularly like. For me, it's a blue pen with a white-metal cap that features gold furniture. The first pen I acquired that satisfied this criterion was THE "51":

But there are obviously other pens that could, and should, join THE "51" in the cabinet. The next one I acquired showed up in 2005. It was this Sheaffer Imperial, and it cemented my love for these pens -- especially when they have a gold band as well as a gold clip:

Later on, I restored this 1949 Touchdown Sentinel:

This week, two more came into the fold. One, which started out life green but met the criterion after a cap swap, was this PFM:

And the second, possibly the Holy Grail of blue pens with white-metal caps and gold furniture, was this first-year "51" with a "Wedding Band" cap:

Color me a very happy camper.

When you steal, steal from the best

Sun, 7 Jun 2009 17:48:05 -0400

There’s something about designing a pen so that it will appeal to the buyer. Technology alone won’t do it; you can design a phenomenally good pen, but if it isn’t pretty it won’t sell. One way, proven by dozens of tributes and outright copies, is to copy the design of a pen that already does sell.
I recently worked on this interesting, and pretty good looking, Italian pen called a Punto Rosso (Red Point):

Look familiar? Maybe if you compare it to this Parker “51”...

Yup. Gold-filled cap with converging lines pattern, washer clip with a jewel covering up the bushing, and — get this — an identical clutch (both the clutch ring on the barrel and the spring-finger clutch in the cap).

Oh, but it gets better. They really couldn’t steal Parker’s patented nib design, so they looked elsewhere. Look familiar?

Yes, it’s an Aurora 88. Nice looking front end, right? Dab a red dot on it, and you get a Punto Rosso.

Clever, these Italians, wot? Steal this, steal that, and you’ve got a new pen! All kidding aside, the Punto Rosso is a pretty cool pen. It turns out to have a very ordinary nib and feed under that hood, not the excellent wing-flow design that Aurora used for the 88, but despite that lapse from thievery it does write well.
‘Nuff for now, I’m off to bed. Big day tomorrow.

Funky? You want funky? We got funky.

Sat, 23 May 2009 13:06:24 -0400

We all get a kick from pens that are a little out of the ordinary. This week, the queue bubbled and burbled and spat onto my bench one of the most “out of the ordinary” pens I’ve seen for a long time. This German piston filler bears the brand name Lomo, as witnessed by the logo that I’ve photocopied from the instruction sheet that was packed with the pen:

The pen itself is called a Stempelschreiber, a typically agglutinative German word that translates to “stamp writer.” No, it doesn’t write postage stamps or anything like that. What it does becomes apparent when you start fooling around with it (which, quite naturally, I did). First, the above photo of the pen may be a little deceptive. You don’t post the cap, you see — you post pretty much the whole thing. The pen, the actual pen, looks like this:

See, there’s a nice piston and a knob and everything. To use the pen, you unscrew it from the body, turn it around, and slip it back into the body. (I forgot to clean off a faint line of flannel dust around the barrel before I shot the first of these two photos, so you can see how far the pen goes in.)
So what’s all that extra length about? Remember the stamp thing? Well, duck, because here it comes. First, we remove the cap:

Then — sort of like an Apollo Lunar Excursion Module — what’s under the cap unfolds.

That funky thing that unfolded like a LEM’s legs is a rubber stamp!
The upper arm, as the unit is shown in the photos, holds an inked stamp pad, and the thingummybob pivoting on its mounting at the end of the lower arm is the stamp. The trigger-like piece sticking out through the side of the lower arm is a brace to keep the stamp from collapsing when you use it, and it’s also the release lever that you push to re-fold the thing. (Note to Apollo geeks: unlike the Lomo’s rubber stamp, the LEM’s legs could not be refolded.)
So, I presume we can all agree that this just about takes first prize in the Funky Fountain Pen category; but for all its weirdness, it actually does work. More, it’s a serious pen: the original nib was a 14K German WARRANTED nib of good quality that had been bent upward far enough to crack across where it entered the section, and I’ve replaced it with a very similar Kaweco nib. The piston mechanism is a very basic one, without a key to keep the piston from rotating as it goes up and down; but friction between the freshly paraffined cork and the barrel wall serves the purpose, and the filler works surprisingly well.
Funky enough for you?

Who made it? And does it matter?

Wed, 20 May 2009 08:43:22 -0400

No-name pens can be fun!
Sometime last year, I was seeking a complete eyedropper-filling pen with a pearl overlay. I had a pen of this description, but that one had come from my parts box as a Frankenpen, and I just didn’t like it enough. So when I saw this pen, I bought it:

It’s a decent writer, and a very nice pen to handle. But its most endearing quality, at least last year, was its appearance. You see, I’m always on the lookout for ideas to use on my annual fountain pen wall calendar. And when we visited some friends in October, I saw on a nearby beach the perfect background for that pen. A photo and some Photoshopping later, and I had July’s calendar picture:

(The theater tickets and the pen weren’t in the original photo; only the granite, the shells, and the sand were there. I reconstructed the tickets from a crappy picture on the Web and then Photoshopped them and the pen into the image.)
I suppose I’m having too much fun again, right?
I recently acquired a no-name BCHR lever filler. Yeah, so?
The eBay auction listed the pen as a Mercantile (Aikin Lambert), and that was my reason for buying it -- but the only Mercantile part was the accommodation clip, which I quickly removed. I was naturally not best pleased, but I didn't go back to the seller and bitch about misrepresentation because the pen seemed to have at least enough potential to justify the price I'd paid.
So yesterday I went ahead and restored the pen, setting it up with a better nib than the one it arrived with. (I used a WARRANTED nib that has a piece broken off at the base, a nib I couldn't sell to a client anyway.)
I fitted the pen with a nice nickel silver accommodation clip, to match its nickel silver lever. Here's the final result:

This is a sweet, sweet writer. The nib is a delicious flexie, and the pen is a perfect size. It's now in my pocket and in my collection.
Moral: When life hands you a rock, make stone soup.