What’s going on at Richard Binder • Fountain Pens

Let’s play Stump the Experts

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:51:54 -0400

This past Thursday, a neat black fountain pen arrived at my door, courtesy of someone who wanted my money more than he wanted the pen. I don’t suppose this scenario is unusual, given that the person in question was offering the pen to the highest bidder on eBay. The pen, on the other hand, is decidedly unusual, and I haven’t a clue what it is.
No, that’s not entirely true. I do know that the pen is branded WATERMANS on its clip and that its barrel bears the legend MADE IN ITALY. Overall size is similar to that of an Aero-metric Parker “51” Slender. And perhaps the most telling clue is that the pen uses C/F cartridges (or a Lady converter, which also fits the C/F as well as the Lady). The Italian provenance is the real stumper for me, as I’m not aware that Waterman made pens in Italy.
That’s enough gabble. Here’s the pen, fitted with a converter:

No, it’s not some sort of funky Parker “51”, but that “51”-style hooded nib really is interesting, isn’t it! Upon disassembling the pen, I found that the nib isn’t a real tubular nib. It’s an ordinary Bock steel nib, imprinted with the goat and everything, mated with an ordinary cartridge/converter-type hard rubber feed. The end of the feed is contoured to fit into the profile under the nib. Like the shell on a Parker “21” Mark I, this pen’s shell plays no part in the ink delivery system.
The body and cap are molded plastic, and they’re well engineered. The whole pen exhibits good design, even in the face of the furniture’s thin plating, which has already begun to wear off despite the fact that the pen was NOS when it arrived.
So, umm, what the dickens is this thing? When was it made? Does it have a model name?
Next puzzle. At about the same time I dropped my bid on that Waterman, I also dropped a bid on a John Holland ringtop. Nowadays nobody cares much about ringtops, so even though it was a very nice pen the Holland didn’t draw a lot of interest from the punters. On the other hand, this punter, the one writing here, was very interested indeed. Look at the pen and see if you can tell why it interests me, before I give it away.

Okay, so it’s a pen. What’s so cool about it?
It’s NOS. Never inked. Original ribbed sac (desiccated, of course, and since replaced). Perfect color, no wear on the chasing. That’ all well and good, but the real reason I plumped for this one is that it’s a hatchet filler. I didn’t have one until this week, and my collection had built up a serious jones for one. Problem solved as of Thursday.
This Lagavulin 16 is getting to taste really good. Time to go make myself a cheddar-and-asparagus omelet. And one for the Managing Partner, too. More anon.

Golden oldies … and other stuff

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:34:02 -0400

No 45s here, folks.
This is Waterman’s ideal Nº 56.

It’s among the all-time classic fountain pens: big and bold, light in weight for extended use, and attractively proportioned. It’s a true classic, a veritable Golden Oldie. What’s not to like, right? How about the fact that Waterman stopped making the 56 about 75 years ago?
So, since Waterman isn’t making the 56 anymore, what do you do if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life finding a 56? What I did was to snag myself one of the Bexley 56s that went to the 2008 Washington DC SuperShow with Bexley president Howard Levy.

Is this a Waterman 56? No, of course not. What it is, is a modern version, the same size and proportions except for its overall length, which Bexley made shorter so that the pen would be a little more pocket friendly in the 21st century. I swapped the Bexley nib out in favor of a plain gold 14K nib, and this is one sweetheart of a pen. It’s not an Oldie, but I think it’s Golden. I’m putting delicate pressure on Bexley to see whether I can get them to produce this pen as a regular item in their catalog instead of just a show special. This is all Howard Levy’s fault, you see, because he sucked me in by selling me that Waterman 56 up there — at the 2007 DC show.
Bits ’n’ pieces…
In other DC show news, I tackled Rob Morrison on Sunday afternoon and extracted from his possession this display cabinet of Esterbrooks.

They’re not all of a piece, so to speak, given that they range from the green Dollar Pen (next to last on right) to the blue Icicle LJ next to it. Even considering the NOS stickered nurse’s pen (the white SJ), they wouldn’t be worth what I paid, except that the black pen on the far left is a Twist Filler. (It’s really a piston filler, but I won’t argue semantics with dead people.) The Twister is in beautiful condition, sterling furniture and all, except for one little problem: the mechanism is dead. I mean seriously deceased.

The rock salt-like chunks in the picture are the remains of roughly two-thirds of the celluloid piston shaft. It was the leadscrew end, of course, which has a two-lead thread and isn’t even a little bit fun to make. It gets worse, naturally. Not only is the piston shaft toast, but the driver, a celluloid tube with internal threads at one end and a smaller shaft at the other for the knob to screw onto, is in two pieces. <heavy sigh> The hopeful news is that the dead parts are on their way to a very good machinist friend of mine who has a CNC lathe, to see whether he can make complete new replacement parts for me.
I took my best-writing vintage pen, a Waterman’s Hundred Year Pen from about 1943, to the show.

I’ve had this pen loaded with my new Dried Blood ink, and it made quite a hit at the show, both at our table and in my sunday morning seminar, in which I expatiated at moderate length on flex nibs: where they came from, how they’re different to ordinary nibs, what it takes to make them, and so on. I’m told that a good time was had by all. I know I had fun!
I have three tons of email to answer, so that’s enough for now.

Ex ungue leonem

Wed, 6 Aug 2008 07:24:04 -0400

One of the hazards of building an illustrated glossary, if you can call it a hazard, is that you need to have illustrations. Which means that I end up taking photos and making drawings.
In many cases, I can poach images that appear elsewhere on my site — but there are always things that I have to create anew. (Of the 774 entries in the glossary as of today, more than 200 have illustrations that are specifically for those entries. One entry that’s been bothering me for more than a year has been the entry for clerical pen. Not being a cleric, I’d never bothered to acquire a clerical pen, so that entry has gone blind (without an illustration) since I wrote it.
Yesterday, that lack finally changed. Some months ago, I stumbled across a cap among my Waterman parts, a black cap bearing chrome-plated furniture along wtih a small Latin cross hot-stamped below the clip and filled with white. Eureka! A cap for a clerical pen! But where was the rest of the pen? it certainly wasn’t attached to the cap.
Taking my cue from the phrase I’ve used for a title at the top of this entry, I decided I would have to build myself a lion. In case you’re not familiar with the phrase, it’s Latin, and it means “From a claw [we may judge of] a lion.” The idea, in my case, is that I could determine from the appearance of the cap what the rest of the pen should look like and then assemble the pieces to build it.
Okay, what does this cap tell me? The clip and its rivet say that the pen was made in the 1950s. (1940s rivets are flatter, and rounded instead of built up into the frustum of a cone.) The double narrow band suggests a pen that was not the top of the line. The size of the cap tells me that this pen was a smaller model, not a larger one, and that means it would likely carry a Nº 2A nib. Being a Waterman but not a C/F, it’s a lever filler.
That’s enough information to get me started. Digging through my Waterman drawers again, I turned up a barrel that had to be correct: right size, right shape, lever filler, complete with a section. It was even black.
But there were a couple of problem.
There was no feed. Ordinary Waterman feeds were too small in diameter, so I had to scavenge up a different section. This was a good thing in my book, because the original section was plastic, not hard rubber: a real bottom feeder. So I chased down a hard rubber section with a Tip-Fill feed. Not correct for a ’50s pen — Waterman discontinued the Tip-Fill feed in the ’30s — but a good overall match, and it was the right size. All it needed was cleaning and a very slight reduction in diameter of the portion that fits into the barrel. Clean it, turn it down, set the feed and a decent Nº 2A nib, and stick on a sac.
The plastic section also explains why there was a mold line around the barrel just forward of the lever box. I have other barrels that are identical except that the mold line has been sanded and polished away. So I sanded away the mold line and polished the barrel.
Oh, dear, this barrel had a badly corroded lever assembly, and what’s worse, it was gold plated. That won’t do, not at all! So I removed the lever assembly and cannibalized a nice bright chrome-plated one from one of the other barrels.
Put it all together, and voilà! A 1950s clerical pen suitable for photography.

This pen is not 100% correct, as I’ve noted: the feed is wrong. But it’s a clean, good-writing representative example of a pen type that I didn’t have before yesterday. And besides, I think it’s cool.
I don’t know whether I’ll be able to make time to blog from the Washington DC SuperShow this weekend, but I’ll be back next week for sure. Probably with a pen or two that I had no intention of buying until I saw them and couldn’t walk away.

Fun and games with hard rubber

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:04:48 -0400

First things first
If you have bookmarked this blog at web.mac.com/richardspens/ you need to edit your bookmark. With the transition to MobileMe, Apple managed to make it so you can’t post comments through the old location. Please edit your bookmark to read web.me.com/richardspens/ — and you will be able to rail at me in public once again.
Now to business
This past weekend, I worked on a Chris Thompson Parker Red Giant replica (shown here in scale with my 1924 Big Red):

I’d worked on this pen before to repair the damaged nib, which was wicked ugly. In so doing, I discovered that the flow was really poor. The feed, which Chris had tried to fashion, was the culprit; not having the ability to make the channels the way Parker made them, Chris hadn’t had much luck. His channels were crude, and they just didn’t work. I tried to adjust them, but the result was a drippy nose. So the pen’s owner had sent the pen back for me to rework, and there was nothing for it but to manufacture a new feed from scratch.
This past Saturday, I dug out a length of hard rubber rod and set to it. Once the diameter was set, I carved out channels that were a duplicate of the original Parker design. I then shaped the front end and turned down the back end for the Lucky Curve. Here’s what the section looks like with the nib and feed installed.

I managed to break off one of the horns from the Lucky Curve while I was setting the nib and feed, but the feature still works, so I didn’t have to make another feed. Here’s what the pen’s business end looks like when it’s all put together:

Will the client be happy? I think so. I hope so — that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

A little Show ’n’ Tell

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:36:44 -0400

Now that Apple has completed the somewhat rocky transition from .mac (which I found perfectly adequate) to MobileMe (which offers a host of features I don’t need or want and also just reeks of Austin Powers and his Mini Me), I can finally see my blog again, and I just gotta to show off a few pens that have come to roost recently.
First is this delightful small Wahl-Eversharp Doric in Blue Shell. It’s a nice pen, and it’s technically interesting because it features Wahl-Eversharp’s ink-view band in the barrel:

For a while, I’ve had a 1946 Golden Brown Striated Parker Vacumatic in my collection because of its splendid barrel transparency. Perfect: No. really good? Oh, yeah! Well, ennyhoo, I was pawing through my drawer of Vacs and Duofolds that might be parts or might be salable, depending on client need, and I turned up a disgustingly cruddy black ’45 Vac. Couldn’t see through it to save your best friend’s life. I decided to give it my best effort and put it into the Vintage Pen Show Tray, noting its lack of transparency. Well, as things turned out, crud on the outside and ink in the barrel can cover up a real jewel. Guess which pen’s going into the tray. Hint: it’s not this one:

And then there wsa the little cigar box of third-tier junkers that came from the friend to whom I swapped my Jade Chilton. That box was full of serious junk. But even a barrel of rotten apples sometimes produces an apple pie, and this was one of those times.

This pen is a VACUUM-FIL branded twist filler (Sheaffer sub-brand), complete with a blind cap that screws up and down like that on an A. A. Waterman MODERN pen. And the blind cap even serves to let you see whether you have ink without uncapping the pen. There is a downside, however. Because the back end of the sac attaches directly to the blind cap, resacking the pen was a nightmare. Attach one end, let it dry overnight, pull the sac through to attach the other end and watch it come loose. It took me several tries to get this one sorted, but now that it’s all assembled the pen is really a delight. I love the celluloid!
One of the great things about working with people is that they frequently teach me things — or, if not actively teaching me, they provide opportunities that I can use as teaching aids. This pen was one such opportunity:

I acquired this pen several years ago but never had worked out how to repair it. So when a client said in an email that he had one and didn’t know how to fill it, I dragged mine out and spent the time learning how to replace the sac without breaking the pen. I then answered the client and explained how to fill the thing. (It’s a Waterman Jif Matic; the filler is a clever adaptation of William Welty’s 1917 Servo filler, in which you lift a tab to pull the pressure bar into the sac instead of pushing it the way a standard lever filler does.)
From the same friend who sold me the blue Doric came this Parker “4”. Now, it’s not that I particularly need a “41”, but it’s a valuable type example, and it likes being next to the “51”s in my pen cabinet.

One more. If you’ve been reading my blog regularly, you’ll remember the black Bexley Sleeve Filler I brought back from the Ohio Show last November. I love it, but I don’t love it as much as the Sleeve Filler that a client gave me this summer. So the black one will go up for sale, and the new one has taken its place in the collection:

This pen is actually Number 25 of 25 in a limited edition, which of course makes it even more wicked cool.
Not all the cool pens I’ve seen in the past couple of weeks are mine. For example, there was this gorgeous Pick flat-top:

And then there was the Conway Stewart 115. Now, this might be a boring pen for some people, but for those of us who like stylographic pens it’s a pretty cool find. I have a client who collects Conway Stewarts, and he has a surprising number of stylos, which Conway referred to as ink pencils.

If you happen to know what model this Waterman pen is, I’d love to know it, too. The pen is lovely, and I’m thinking of it as a predecessor of the Carène:

That ought to about do it for now. The next really good opportunity to play Show ’n’ Tell will be at the Washington DC SuperShow, 211/2 weeks from now. Maybe you’ll have something to bring along?