Waterman Exclusive Cartridge

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

Does anyone know what kind of cartridge the 80's/90's Waterman pens take? A standard short is too thick for the barrel, a standard long is thin enough but too long.

 

As a sidenote, man, these pens were ridiculously low quality. The threads are wafer thin and made of super soft plastic, which is such a bad idea when you are mating them with brass metal threads. I'm not sure what happened in the 80's to inspire pens of this quality to be manufactured, must have been some form of mass hysteria.

[Sailor Kenshin]

Standards almost never fit Waterman pens.  You'd have to try a real Waterman cartridge or converter (if you have one.)

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

I have a newer Waterman Allure and I am pretty sure it takes standard cartridges. They market their cartridges as "short international" as well. That seems like false advertising if they are not in fact "standard." Maybe standard has a different meaning in French?

 

https://www.waterman.com/inks/ink-cartridges/short-ink-cartridge/SAP_S0110940.html

 

Quote

 This set of six Short International Ink Cartridges are ideal for use with your Waterman fountain pen.

 

I have a cold so I am more frustrated than usual, I have a pen that I paid $50 for that is now a nice paperweight because I broke the threads trying to put in a cartridge that should have fit. Maybe I should use it as a dart? Too heavy.

[Bo Bo Olson]

If bought new, ship it back to the seller or Waterman for warentee work.

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

It's an old pen, doubtful they would take it for repairs, especially since they don't make it anymore. 

[Bo Bo Olson]

I don't know your cost, it's worth, or if you really like it.

.................

What's mine....should work, even if for more than it's worth.........do check with a good US repairman...like IndiDance...a bad misspelling but she's local...Indianan my guess. Richard Binder was her teacher. and she is well known.

Ron Zorn is a major repair man who often shares his wisdom on the com...contact him.

..............

These pens cost more to repair than they were worth. The blue one..an E.Germany make has an EEF nib.

The other was just pretty, and needed a rebuild so that ran a bit more than a gasket.I have so many semi-flex, that one more don't matter. '50-60's.

 

This the mandrel wrapped one on the white inkwell, is eventually going to have a new gasket put on it...and it is a real no name, but it is mine. What am I to do, throw it away?

Can't sell it if it don't work....when the Estate time comes.

 

 

[arcfide]

5 hours ago, LoveBigPensAndCannotLie said:

Does anyone know what kind of cartridge the 80's/90's Waterman pens take? A standard short is too thick for the barrel, a standard long is thin enough but too long.

 

As a sidenote, man, these pens were ridiculously low quality. The threads are wafer thin and made of super soft plastic, which is such a bad idea when you are mating them with brass metal threads. I'm not sure what happened in the 80's to inspire pens of this quality to be manufactured, must have been some form of mass hysteria.

 

The traditional wisdom that I have always heard is that Waterman pens take Waterman cartridges, and often don't take other cartridges, though I believe it is also said that sometimes Waterman cartridges will work with other pens (just not the other way around). 

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

Ugh, I think this is why non-pen people think that fountain pens are too complicated. And I guess they'd be right in this situation. "Standard" international apparently is not so standard. Mind you, I've had this issue with other pens too.

 

I have a Faber Castell that I bought a while back that I actually like quite a bit, it did not come with a converter so I bought a generic Schmidt converter, you would think that would fit properly. It almost does to the point where it'll go on the connector but it is not tight and it leaks. International "standard" eh? Standard cartridges (like Diamine) work just fine.

 

At least with brands like Lamy, Sailor, Pilot, Platinum, etc., you know exactly where you stand, you need to buy their specific proprietary cartridges/converters. Anything "standard" is a crapshoot.

[Sailor Kenshin]

15 minutes ago, LoveBigPensAndCannotLie said:

Ugh, I think this is why non-pen people think that fountain pens are too complicated. And I guess they'd be right in this situation. "Standard" international apparently is not so standard. Mind you, I've had this issue with other pens too.

 

I have a Faber Castell that I bought a while back that I actually like quite a bit, it did not come with a converter so I bought a generic Schmidt converter, you would think that would fit properly. It almost does to the point where it'll go on the connector but it is not tight and it leaks. International "standard" eh? Standard cartridges (like Diamine) work just fine.

 

At least with brands like Lamy, Sailor, Pilot, Platinum, etc., you know exactly where you stand, you need to buy their specific proprietary cartridges/converters. Anything "standard" is a crapshoot.

 

It really is.  Sometimes it's a matter of swapping this and that cart or con until you find one that fits.

[arcfide]

12 minutes ago, LoveBigPensAndCannotLie said:

"Standard" international apparently is not so standard. Mind you, I've had this issue with other pens too.

 

This is one of the first things you learn when it comes to fountain pens. The "standard international" means almost nothing. I think the standard itself really only refers to something like the inner or outer dimension on the nipple of the section (or maybe the opening of the cartridge), and so things like the body diameter, length, and so forth can all be different enough that they won't fit in some pens, or will fit too loosely in other pens, and so forth. I think the standard itself did technically emerge from pens like Waterman, Parker, Pelikan, and so forth, but each of these makers was producing pens long before the standard existed, and so each has a slightly different take on that standard. It doesn't help that many pens are close enough so that sometimes things work, and sometimes they don't. Often, cartridges are able to be more forgiving than converters, if only because you can use a softer plastic in the cartridges that then can stretch and mold itself easier to a given nipple. 

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

22 minutes ago, arcfide said:

Often, cartridges are able to be more forgiving than converters, if only because you can use a softer plastic in the cartridges that then can stretch and mold itself easier to a given nipple. 

 

Yeah, that's what happened for me in this case, I was able to force the standard cartridge on. But unfortunately the plastic on these pens is very fragile and it caused the threads to crack. I don't know, maybe it was already structurally compromised, I don't think I put that much force into it.

 

I've glued them back together. It's probably not the correct fix but I think it will have to do. The rest of the pen isn't in great condition either. And I've put in an order for some Waterman cartridges reluctantly... if they don't fit I will be very confused. I have an old Waterman converter from one of the Waterman Lady pens but I need to replace the sac on it and I don't have the correct size at the moment. That should fit for sure as the sections for the pens seem to be completely interchangeable. 

 

I do have to say, these pens make you realize that even as recently as the 80's, manufacturers' mastery of plastics has really improved (for better or for worse, I'm sure all the microplastics in our water are not a good thing...). The plastic on the threads for these pens is something you'd only see in the cheapest of cheap pens these days.

[arcfide]

3 hours ago, LoveBigPensAndCannotLie said:

 

Yeah, that's what happened for me in this case, I was able to force the standard cartridge on. But unfortunately the plastic on these pens is very fragile and it caused the threads to crack. I don't know, maybe it was already structurally compromised, I don't think I put that much force into it.

 

I've glued them back together. It's probably not the correct fix but I think it will have to do. The rest of the pen isn't in great condition either. And I've put in an order for some Waterman cartridges reluctantly... if they don't fit I will be very confused. I have an old Waterman converter from one of the Waterman Lady pens but I need to replace the sac on it and I don't have the correct size at the moment. That should fit for sure as the sections for the pens seem to be completely interchangeable. 

 

I do have to say, these pens make you realize that even as recently as the 80's, manufacturers' mastery of plastics has really improved (for better or for worse, I'm sure all the microplastics in our water are not a good thing...). The plastic on the threads for these pens is something you'd only see in the cheapest of cheap pens these days.

 

I had an inexpensive, but nicely marbled and lacquered Waterman as my first fountain pen, and I loved that pen. I still have it, but the plastic degraded on the section and cracked. I'm not sure whether it was age or whether using some different inks eventually degraded the section enough. However, I think Waterman had at least a few pens where the plastics didn't hold up that well. Of course, I think Lamy had a production issue a while back where their feeds were not properly mixed, and so the resin ended up too soft and when you used higher saturation inks, the inks ended up destroying the feeds on those pens. Lamy had to do a recall and correct the issue with that batch of pens. 

[Bo Bo Olson]

Piston pens, plastic gasket 2.0...'55 and later is still in use.

Plastic gasket 1.0 '38-55 can give up the ghost, but not always.

 

One can replace that plastic gasket 1.0 with a boiled in oil and beeswax cork gasket, the smoothest of all gaskets as Marshal and Oldfield said in their great repair book, ..........especially if slathered with silicon grease.

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

 

I got a hold of some Waterman cartridges. I took a picture of one with the cartridge I tried to put in yesterday (cleaned it out for future use):

 

 

Frankly, Waterman should be ashamed of themselves. Absolutely nothing about this cartridge is the same as a "standard international" one. I compared it to a few other standard cartridges I have of different brands, and the rest are more or less the same as the empty one, with minor variation. Even a Herlitz branded one (presumably made by Pelikan, since they own Herlitz).

 

The Waterman cartridge is thinner, shorter, and has a very slightly wider opening. Which also explains why the converter connector got a little mangled when I tried to put the real standard cartridge on, it was too small. They should be marketing these as proprietary cartridges.

[arcfide]

5 hours ago, LoveBigPensAndCannotLie said:

They should be marketing these as proprietary cartridges.

 

It's strange that they aren't. Everywhere that I have seen, Waterman has usually been thought of as a proprietary cartridge, but somehow this seems to have changed, as I'm seeing product specifications for Waterman pens say that they are International Standard. Still, I've also heard, as I mentioned above, that the international standard has almost nothing to do with the actual dimensions of pretty much any part of the cartridge except the opening. 

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

17 minutes ago, arcfide said:

 

It's strange that they aren't. Everywhere that I have seen, Waterman has usually been thought of as a proprietary cartridge, but somehow this seems to have changed, as I'm seeing product specifications for Waterman pens say that they are International Standard. Still, I've also heard, as I mentioned above, that the international standard has almost nothing to do with the actual dimensions of pretty much any part of the cartridge except the opening. 

 

Hmm, but even the opening does not match. The Waterman cartridges are wider at the mouth by just a little bit. When I originally thought that this pen used a standard standard (you know what I mean) international cartridge I tried putting one on and it took considerable force to push it on and even deformed the connector a little bit. A spare Montblanc converter I have did not fit either, the opening was again too small.

 

I bought one of those little 6-packs of Waterman cartridges and it very clearly says on the box "international cartridges" too. I dunno. I started collecting about 5-6 years ago and for that entire duration my understanding was that Waterman used standard cartridges. 

 

I am a little annoyed. I'll take my lumps if I break a pen and it's my fault. I've restored a lot of pens and broken many in the process and I'll accept when it's something that I should have done differently. But standard cartridges should fit this pen, and at the very least trying to put one in shouldn't break the threads...

 

At least hopefully this thread will benefit someone googling this months or years from now and stops them from making the same mistake I did.

[I-am-not-really-here]

On 3/3/2024 at 10:11 AM, LoveBigPensAndCannotLie said:

Does anyone know what kind of cartridge the 80's/90's Waterman pens take?

Not to be sarcastic but the answer I believe is a Waterman-branded cartridge specifically from that era, i.e. from the 20th century, NOT anytime in the 21st.  1980 is a long time ago... I do not know if was there an international standard back then but I bet there was a Waterman Standard and the one for U.S. bound pens might even have differed from European ones.

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

Oh, the modern Waterman short cartridges fit perfectly. It's like they were built for the pen, I'm sure they have not changed the design or shape of them since the 80's. And I'm sure a modern Waterman converter would fit great as well. The problem is they're marketed as "international standard" when they most certainly are not standard.

[I-am-not-really-here]

52 minutes ago, LoveBigPensAndCannotLie said:

The problem is they're marketed as "international standard" when they most certainly are not standard.

I recommend raising your concerns with Waterman directly.  

[LoveBigPensAndCannotLie]

Yeah, I doubt they would care. Looks like this has been a topic of ongoing discussion for a long time:

 

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/162341-waterman-ink-cartridge-compatibility/

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/263837-waterman-and-international-cartridges/

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/7003-waterman-fountain-pens-and-international-size-ink/

 

If they haven't addressed it for now, they never will. I find this comment interesting:

  

On 1/24/2006 at 5:35 PM, Michael Wright said:

Yup, this happens with most Waterman pens. They are carefully designed not to take generic internationals. However, some of the cheapies, in which they haven't put in a brass sleeve, do take internationals, e.g. the Kultur and some of their school pens.

 

Michael

 

who hopes digging the empty one out won't take too long

 

Surely Waterman wouldn't be doing it on purpose. 🙄