Pilot 3A

August 27, 2009

Hello, everyone,

Thanks to a Pay It Forward by bphollin, I acquired a grey-bodied 3A for my son who is starting his senior year of high school on Monday. He's not sure about the pen ("It's kinda old, dude.") and is wavering between several of my other pens as a possible swap, but I've been trying to emphasize the coolness factor of using an "old" pen that none of his schoolmates is likely to have ever even seen.

We'll see what happens there, but in the meantime does anyone here know when this pen was likely to have been manufactured? The styling suggests somehwere between the mid-60s and mid-80s, but there doesn't seem to be any information at all on the Web that I have been able to find apart from eBay and other sales pitches. The pen is grey as I said, with a gold-ish metallic cap, and a gold clip and butt button, and a gold-plated nib of what I've seen called a fingernail style. The feed and section are all one piece, smooth plastic with only a single opening that I assume is the end of the tube that runs into the sac of the unusual-looking aerometric style squeeze filler. The end of the metal filler part has a blue plastic bead I assume is meant to support the metal and keep it from breaking at that point. The sac is thick and black and doesn't feel like rubber, more like vinyl, but I could be mistaken; it also carries a faint odor of cigarette smoke.

There was a bit of sticky adhesive left on the barrel where a sticker may have been at one time, and a short (1/2 cm) crack in the left side of the section which shows a line of ink, but doesn't leak further than that, and I will try rubbing some wax onto it to see if I can seal it; there's no stress there so it shouldn't propagate. The arrow in the attached image points to it.

So, any information? Links? Anything? :-)

August 28, 2009

I have a pink one of those that was sold as a Pilot 2A and says so on the barrel sticker. (it also gives the price as 650 Korean won, which is apparently about 53 cents today )

I would think it's from the eighties, but I have no definite idea.

ETA: This thread and its speculation might help: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/in...howtopic=120626

Maybe it is toward the earlier range of your guess. Most 1970s Japanese pens I have seen on ebay are c/c fillers so that could be when the transition occurred.

Edited August 28, 2009 by cchan

August 28, 2009

Thank you, cchan; I haven't found much about the 2A either, unfortunately. I gather this was a very inexpensive, mass-market pen and so not very exciting to most collectors. I should have mentioned also that the nib is labeled "Pilot - Made in Korea - Super Quality."

August 28, 2009

With Pilot's current corporate profile, I would doubt the existence of a history department within Pilot Pen US. I could try contacting them though. Maybe they could direct me to the suitable department of Pilot Pen in Japan.