What is on your bench?

[VacNut]

It would be great if the display was with the pens, but I suspect it was thrown away long ago. 
There are probably differing opinions on whether or not they should have caps. 

[FarmBoy]

10 hours ago, VacNut said:

It would be great if the display was with the pens, but I suspect it was thrown away long ago. 
There are probably differing opinions on whether or not they should have caps. 

The tester set had caps and is not a prototype. 

[es9]

I wonder why we don’t see more of these. Were they only offered for a limited time and/or were they expensive? It seems like a useful sales tool, though I guess not very cost effective if almost everyone just wanted a F or M. 

[eckiethump]

On 6/2/2023 at 2:07 PM, ralfstc said:

That is so cool, Eric! You get some great jobs! What work do you have to do on them?

 

Cheers,

 

Ralf 

A full service to working condition again, thee are a tester set.

[eckiethump]

On 6/4/2023 at 7:59 PM, FarmBoy said:

The tester set had caps and is not a prototype. 

The one on the far right in the first picture is a protype, never used in production. As I said, I will be doing a ful article on it for the WES Journal.

[VacNut]

Just curious. What is the fascination with the prototype pens? Is it the novelty, the history, the aesthetic, or that it is uncommon?  I do not use the would rare as a personalized pen with an owners monogram would be rare.

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

This is a much less interesting pen than others posted here but I was mildly proud of the work I did on it so I thought I'd post it. I received this pen as a gift so I wanted to restore it and make it in as close to good condition as possible. 

 

Some before shots below. The pen was in mostly good condition with the exception of the section and the nib. The section had a bunch of scratches and tool marks and the tines were bent with one tine bent down and outwards at the tip.

 

 

 

And after:

 

To my surprise, it writes super smooth. Didn't even have to smooth it out after I managed to realign the tipping. I also polished off some of the tooling marks but I don't have course enough sandpaper to get rid of it all. I'm okay with this, a few signs of age are fine, and it's much better than it was.

 

Unfortunately after I inked it up I realized that the nib has a huge hairline crack going through it from below the "14kt" imprint all the way to the "A" in "Warranted." Don't think I caused it since it is visible in the first pic, but I didn't notice it until much later. Kind of a bummer but I am assuming as long as I don't mess with the nib it should be stable. 

 

As a sidenote, I've had really good experience with these small warranted nibs with the "warranted" script in a half-circle pattern. I have another one with one of these and I've found both to be smooth and very soft. The tines don't open up a lot but they open up very very easily, great flex nibs.

[VacNut]

Congratulations on jumping in to the vintage pen world. It is sometimes heartbreaking at the end of a restoration and you realize you missed something, you incorrectly “fixed” the pen, or the repair doesn’t last.

At best vintage pens are an ongoing saga that never ends, but that is part of the attraction.

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

10 minutes ago, VacNut said:

Congratulations on jumping in to the vintage pen world. It is sometimes heartbreaking at the end of a restoration and you realize you missed something, you incorrectly “fixed” the pen, or the repair doesn’t last.

At best vintage pens are an ongoing saga that never ends, but that is part of the attraction.

 

Oh I've been restoring them for a while (well, a bit over a year) but that feeling of disappointment never gets old. I don't mind it so much when it's an existing issue, feels way worse if it's a problem I introduced. Which happens semi-often unfortunately. 

 

Still, I'm happy with this one, the pen probably wouldn't have written before with how mangled the tipping was. So crack or not, it's an improvement. Now I've got a Sheaffer Balance with a section that feels like it's shellacked in to contend with, don't have a good feeling about that one.

[VacNut]

If you keep trying you sometimes get lucky. A group of Brown Vacumatics - Golden Web - for cleaning, parts, and restoration.

First Brown Vac is a USA made Vac Pen with uncommon clarity. There is little ambering, but the transparency is never great on these Vacs. There is a pic of this pen next to others. It is much more clear than the others.

 

The second pen is a Canadian made Vac. I am guessing the gold band was added in France. It says “Au C Beneoist d’AZY LUVA Marseille 25–9-1938”, which matches the imprint on the pen. My French is non-existent, and Google is little help. A translation would be helpful from anyone who speaks French.

 

A Canadian Vac with the imprint “Made in Canada for export”. I have seen canadian and US made Vacs, but I don’t see this imprint often. I am guessing it was imprinted so local taxes would not have to be paid. 

Another Canadian made Vac that I was able to rebuild from the parts pens. Unfortunately the Canadian and US made pens weren’t always built with the same dimensions, so you have to stock two sets of parts if you are rebuilding pens.

Last pen is a U.S. Made Vac. A newer nib has been installed. The lockdown filler was corroded, so it had to be rebuilt with a replacement alum sleeve.

 

The storage box has finally been filled, so I no longer need to buy anymore brown vacs. Although a few more gold wide banded pens would be cool. They pens look great as a group.

 

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

My latest misadventure:

 

 

If it's not immediately obvious, I screwed up the threads for the filler unit somehow and the blindcap is no longer flush. It was much worse than this initially but I took out the filler again and raked the threads with a brass shim and some dental tools for half an hour and it is a little better, but still not great. I looked at the threads in the barrel and they look completely clean. I give up at this point.

 

Also had a small mishap where the new unused diaphragm I had on hand was missing its pellet. I kept shoving it into the cup wondering why it wasn't sticking and then saw it was super flabby near the tip, no pellet! I went digging through my parts bag and thankfully I had an extra diaphragm I purchased months ago that I must have forgotten. I am going to have to go back to the store I bought it from to see what's going on. 

 

This is my third vacumatic filler (2nd Parker 51, 1st one was a speedline) "restoration" and I think it will be my last, I can't stand these. Beautiful pens but I am pretty sure Parker and Sheaffer were in a race to the bottom in the 30's trying to come up with the least maintainable pens possible. On a whole, I think the vacumatic filling system is inferior to button and lever fillers in almost every single possible way except aesthetically in regards to allowing the earlier Vacumatics' beautiful transparent barrels. 

 

Similarly I much prefer Aerometrics except for the aesthetics, I like the more art-deco-esque clip on these older Vacumatics. And the caps were more interesting than the lustraloy you find on most aerometrics. But am I willing to sacrifice functionality for aesthetics... I am not sure.

[FarmBoy]

Don’t tighten the filler nut so tight, if no one shaved it to fit it will line right up by pushing it in the direction needed. 

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

I tried taking it out and putting it back in several times (...), it didn't really seem to make a difference. Even when it is in loosely when I did a test fit to polish the body, it was very misaligned. I think I need to get a vac wrench, maybe I deformed the threads somehow with the block. They don't look deformed but who knows...

 

I'll try taking it out the filler and putting it back in one more time after I run through the ink that's in here but I'm not too hopeful. I am a little apprehensive about screwing and unscrewing the filler so much. I know acrylic is (relatively) sturdy but I'm worried about breaking the barrel.

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

I tried for about an hour to reseat the filler nut, tried a bunch of times and went as far as taking the entire filling unit out and reseating that completely.

 

Marginally better but not a big difference. I've uninked it and it will be going in a pen case to never to be inked again (at least not by me). Only reason I am keeping it and not putting it in a parts bin for a pen show is it was a gift.

 

Also thinking of chucking the vac block into the trash. If I ever give another vacumatic a chance, I will invest in getting the proper tools for it, and this piece of trash is not a proper tool.

 

Edit: I am running on like 5 hours of sleep because of work and I may be a little upset this restoration went sideways. Don't take any of this too seriously.

[lionelc]

agree about the right tools - can make the difference between an easy repair or a rage quit

[VacNut]

It is hard to see the misalignment of the end cap to the barrel in the photo. Is there a chance that either the end cap or barrel is not round and they have to align precisely to avoid the misalignment?

The benefit of the vacs and 51 is the quantity of ink the pen can store without increasing the barrel diameter. Relatively speaking it hold more ink that a button filler or Aeromatic

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

It was fine before I took the filler out, so I do not think the issue is that the barrel or blindcap are out of shape. There is a serious wear ring at the top of the blindcap from someone posting this pen very hard but otherwise everything structurally looks more or less as it should. It's either an issue I introduced when I took the filler out or I am somehow screwing it back in wrong. I'll try to take some pics with better lighting later when I am done with work.

 

At some point I want to measure how much ink these hold. I get that in theory it will hold more, but the filler seems incredibly inefficient to me to the point where, sure, theoretically it will hold more ink, but you'll be screwing around with it for five minutes trying to get the perfect fill. I am also a little skeptical that a Parker 51 will hold more ink than an early senior Duofold. The earlier lockdown fillers that had more barrel space for ink, probably, but the 51 I am skeptical about. 

 

These are also by far the most difficult pens to clean out in my entire collection. I've been using a Parker 61 with a capillary filler as my daily writer for a few weeks now and that one is blissfully easy to clean out despite the capillary fillers' poor reputation. Stick a bulb syringe on one end and it's good to go after a few flushes. I've found that even Snorkels are easier to clean out than vacs. I guess these are very much a "one ink for life" type of pen, even moreso than the other vintage pens I mentioned. I only use Waterman Serenity Blue in my vintage pens but I rotate through my pens frequently and I like to put them away as clean as possible for next time, so it's a pain. Maybe I need to "build" one of those patented salad spinner centrifuges...

 

I'm so conflicted about these pens. I think the Parker Vacs (not necessarily the Parker 51 vacs) are some of the most gorgeous and well-built pens ever produced. Fantastic nibs too. Parker knew their stuff. But I hate the vacumatic filling system. And sure, some of it may be that I am bad at restoring these. But I have a few that I had restored "professionally" before I got the tools to do my own, and I don't find that those are significantly more reliable fillers. The filling system seems to just not be practical.

[FarmBoy]

Parker intended both Vac and Aero full size 51s to hold between 1.4 and 1.6 ml. 
 

If someone before you filed and sanded the blindcap and barrel to fit you will not get it to lineup without sone effort and even then you may not get it. 
 

If the barrel and blindcap are as they left Janesville it will go back the way it was. 

[VacNut]

A duofold is limited to the size of the sac. The remainder of the barrel is the j-bar. Given the much smaller diameter, the Vacs hold quite a bit of ink.
 

Other than the diaphragm the vac filler is fairly dependable with no additional washers and gaskets (unless the alum filler has been corroded by the ink).

I know most users like to remove every bit of ink from a pen when it is stored, but I don’t think it needs to be done on a vac, so long as corrosive ink is not used. The feed, nib, and barrel are robust.

 

Is the filler the plastic “plunger” type? I am assuming any residual diaphragm has been scraped from the “cone-shaped” seat for the inner collar of the filler, so the filler can sit centered in the pen? Diaphragm residue can cause the filler to be crooked when the filler is screwed down onto the seat. 

[FarmBoy]

4 hours ago, VacNut said:

Is the filler the plastic “plunger” type? I am assuming any residual diaphragm has been scraped from the “cone-shaped” seat for the inner collar of the filler, so the filler can sit centered in the pen? Diaphragm residue can cause the filler to be crooked when the filler is screwed down onto the seat. 

Not really.