Help My Parker 51 Has A Terrible Dry Flow

[Charles Rice]

 

Also I do not have shellac to seal the threads in the event that I remove the hood to use the thin brass strips and that adding that I have no experience restoring fountain pens..

 

 

You don't need to re-seal it. As for experience, a 51 is a beginners level repair, If I can do it, you can do it. Look to some YouTube videos.

[Edo98]

[Edo98]

Hi, sorry if I could not tell you about the condition of my pen, it was very busy.

 

The seller behaved kindly and kindly and told me to send the pen back, I have no idea what problem the pen has presented but he told me that he had to replace the nib with a new one and now it works fine.

He is a really reliable seller Mr. Ernesto Soler

[northstar]

The nib tines are too close, need to be adjusted.

[davidtaylorjr]

I bought a 51, also from a reputable site, not Ebay, and it is dry as a desert. These pens get so much hype, I don't see what the fuss is about, feel like I wasted money.

[inkstainedruth]

What is the nib width on yours?  If it's got an EF nib, the tines might need to be opened up a bit (I have two with EF nibs, one Aerometric and one 51 Vac, and I needed to have work done on the nibs to open up the tines on them).  Mind you, most of mine were bought in the wild or on eBay, so I expected them to need at least some maintenance.  If you don't trust yourself to do that sort of work (I didn't) a good nibmeister at a pen show can do the work for roughly twenty bucks US, and that will be money well spent.  

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

[crescentfiller]

3 hours ago, davidtaylorjr said:

I bought a 51, also from a reputable site, not Ebay, and it is dry as a desert. These pens get so much hype, I don't see what the fuss is about, feel like I wasted money.

 

David, PM me.

[FarmBoy]

Many factors at play. The ink and paper can impact the wetness. It can almost always be adjusted. 

[bunnspecial]

At this point, I think I have bought 3 51 Vacs from the same reputable seller in nib sizes from F to XXF.

 

Of those three, one wrote way too dry for my taste. With the whole reputable seller thing and all, I contacted him, he instructed me to do a soapy water rinse and retry, and then that didn't change anything I sent it back and it was back to me in about 3 weeks(I did send a bunch of other repairs with it in the same box...). When I wrote the in box note to him, I actually used another of my 51s and said "I want it to write like this" along side a writing sample from the one I was sending for adjustment.

 

I have a broad italic that was dry enough that it wouldn't consistently write its line width. I actually paid a decent premium for the pen thanks to that nib, and the person who sold it to me(a collector who I've traded back and forth with a lot and I know was being honest with me) basically said "I think I just don't know how to write with this pen." It took a bit of tine widening and became a lovely writer.

 

With all of that said, when I'm not happy with how a pen, particularly a vintage pen, writes I work backwards and start with the ink. Usually I initially test with Waterman Serenity Blue since if a pen doesn't write with that, there's really something wrong. With Parkers and 51s specifically, I often pick Quink Washable Blue since it's only slightly less wet and is easier to clean out of pens like 51s and Vacs. Once I've ruled that out, I'll start looking at other things.

 

One last thing-my first two 51s didn't leave me particularly excited either. I bought both out of a friend's miscellaneous pen cup, so were unrestored. One was a fine black Aero, which certainly had nothing WRONG with it but just didn't wow me. The second was a Navy Gray vac(my first Vac in any form) with a vermeil cap that I sent off since I didn't have a clue how to work on one then. When I sent it off, I'd noticed it was fairly scratch. It came back the same way, but wrote an extremely fine line. I never measured the line width, but I suspect it was an accountant point or needlepoint(in the XXXF range). In retrospect I wish I'd kept it. I now have a Pilot VP that has a custom needlepoint grind(bought already done) and that's just the nature of that type nib.

 

I finally started buying broader nibs from England and found myself enjoying them, then came back to some more standard F-XXF ones and now love the pens. The newest of these has been around, what, 60 years now? and the oldest 80, and they've had a lot of time to have a lot of things done to them. Outside the Queen's often referenced 51, I doubt many of them have been in continuous use since new.

[davidtaylorjr]

I should be clear that when I say dry I mean won't even start to write half the time.

[Glenn-SC]

8 hours ago, davidtaylorjr said:

I should be clear that when I say dry I mean won't even start to write half the time.

And the previous owner of this 70 year old pen may have liked a dry writing pen or may used a very wet ink. Or you nay be using a dry one.  Not every ink writes the same in every pen. Frustrating, huh?

Whatever it is it can be corrected. 
 

Fountain pens have variability. (In my experience, even mass-produced ball point refills have variability, with some of my favorite brand writing well and a few others writing poorly.  Frustrating isn’t it.). The cost to “correct” your “51” should be minimal compared to the years that it will be a wonderful writing instrument for you. 
 

Or sell it and move on. 

[davidtaylorjr]

On 2/28/2022 at 6:11 PM, Glenn-SC said:

And the previous owner of this 70 year old pen may have liked a dry writing pen or may used a very wet ink. Or you nay be using a dry one.  Not every ink writes the same in every pen. Frustrating, huh?

Whatever it is it can be corrected. 
 

Fountain pens have variability. (In my experience, even mass-produced ball point refills have variability, with some of my favorite brand writing well and a few others writing poorly.  Frustrating isn’t it.). The cost to “correct” your “51” should be minimal compared to the years that it will be a wonderful writing instrument for you. 
 

Or sell it and move on. 

Update. Pierce, I may have had a bad batch of Parker Black. I put noodler's black in the pen and it writes like a dream.

[inkstainedruth]

Yay!  

One of the first inks that wasn't blue or black I ever bought was Noodler's Walnut.  Dry as a bone.  Turned out, though, that the pen I'd put it in, a Platinum Plaisir, was also a dry writer.  When I bought my first Pelikan, a 1990s era M400 Brown Tortoise, I thought I'd use the pen (with its juicy and springy nib) for drawing, and put Iroshizuku Yama-guri in it.  NOT a good combo -- wet pen, wet ink.  So I then tried the Noodler's Walnut and and the pen saved the ink for me -- it was wet enough to coax the ink to perform better, and the ink was dry enough that the pen wasn't a complete firehose (Edelstein Smoky Quartz LE is also really good in that pen -- and almost the same color as Yama-guri...).  

But it does take some playing around to see what pen/ink combos do (or do not, as the case might be) work.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[mitto]

It is a few minutes job to turn a dry writing P51 into a ink gushing wet writer. 

 

A few reasons for dry writing :

Feed channel is clogged. 

Nib tip is too close to to hood tip. 

Nib is not properly sifting on feed. 

 

[Number99]

Hello.

 

 I sometimes write Japanese vertically (modern Japanese notation is horizontal writing from left to right and vertical writing with line breaks to the left). When writing vertically with this pen, it starts skipping at the 3rd character, it seems that it does not work when the angle of the pen becomes acute.

 Are you gripping the nib side of the section by not posting the cap?

 When writing vertically with this pen( I understand you don't write vertically)

, I have to post the cap and frequently shift the wrist and the paper to write well.

 If the report of this phenomenon is helpful ...

 It is a very good pen that can write very good characters one by one, but it seems that this model was not as popular as 45 or 75 in Japan.

 

 

 

Edited March 7, 2022 by Number99