Drippy Musings
19 Notes from the Work Bench posts. How the restorations are done: re-saccing a lever filler, restoring a Parker Vacumatic, a Sheaffer TouchDown, a Conklin Crescent, polishing celluloid by wet sanding, and the snorkels that fought back. The bench posts new collectors are sent to first.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Polishing a vintage pen can be a surprisingly dangerous exercise in vintage pen restoration. If you use the wrong method on the wrong material, you will ruin your pen. If you overdo it with the correct method and correct material, you will ruin your pen. We will not be held liable for any…
This is a new old stock Parker Vacumatic Maxima in the “Golden Pearl” design. Check out the barrel clarity! When it comes to vintage Parker pens, Parker Vacumatics are my favorite. I love their stunning art deco designs and over-complicated filling system. The pens have some quirks, too, but, I still love them. As the…
Fixing a Sheaffer TouchDown filler can be easy with a little practice. Personally, I love the functionality and simplicity of the design that uses pneumatics to collapse an ink sac and allow its natural vacuum to draw ink back into the pen. Most of what you need to fix a Sheaffer TouchDown filler is right…
You can see a Pilot G2 refill next to a Pelikan standard rollerball refill in this photo. Look closely, and you can see that a G2 will fit most rollerball pens that take standard RB refils. Quite possibly the most popular disposable pens on earth are Pilot G2 gel pens. They are so incredibly smooth…
We are by no means done with the Decameron 2020 Project. However, I felt like getting back to pens for a posting. If you’ve been mostly coming for the storytelling, who knows, maybe you’ll get a kick out of a deeper dive into old fountain pens. Here is a Conklin Crescent 2NL fountain pen in…
You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, the old saying goes, and it is true for learning how to fix vintage pens. Today, we are going to learn how to restore a lever-filling fountain pen…or re-sac it, as they say. But first, you are going to have to get used to the…
(There is risk in doing any repair. We will not be held liable for what happens to your pen if you break it while trying the following advice.) Changing a nib on a Lamy Safari or AL-Star is easy. All you need is the pen, tape and a replacement nib. Lamy Safari and AL-Star pens…
Not too long ago we were approached by a radio restoration expert named Jaime A. for help on his special 1938 Detrola radio desk set. One of the two Parker Vacumatic trumpets had broken and he needed a replacement. We just so happened to be lucky enough to have a replacement trumpet set. A fully…
Once in a rare while, I find that the section of a pen has lost its nipple to attach an ink sac. Sometimes, an old nipple is just too heavily damaged to patch together or seat a bladder. On the vintage Wahl fountain pen below from the 1920s, the nipple actually was still attached to…
If you have been following these Drippy Musings for some time now, you know that the Sheaffer Snorkel fountain pen has been the bane of my existence for the past decade. I love these pens in all of their complicated filling mechanism glory, but I could never tame those very filling systems. Here are the…
Use Testors paints to fill in the blue diamond of your Parker Vacumatic clips. Some clips have old paint that tells how dark you should repaint it. Testors 1111 Dark Blue paint is good for darker blue diamonds and 1110 Blue is good for lighter blue diamonds. I used the 1110 Blue on the Vac…
WARNING: The following repair advice can easily mess up your favorite nib if you aren’t careful and experienced. You think you’ve found the perfect pen at a show, estate sale or antique store. The color is good. The filling system still works. And then you try to write with it. Although the nib looks good,…
