Sheaffer Nib Grades' actual widths - do they vary across different decades?

[Mercian]

Hi all,

I (currently) have precisely one Sheaffer - a 'Triumph 444' from the 1980s.

 

My pen was sold to me as having a 'Fine' nib on it, although of course no nib grade is indicated anywhere on the pen, or the box/paperwork that I received with it.

 

Now, my experience of writing with my pen is that I find its nib to be wider than I would have expected from a pen sold as having an 'F' nib; that its nib is more like the width of a modern (post-1980) Parker 'M'.

 

I decided to look for information about nib-widths/grading on here, and I found the very useful thread about the range of widths within which each Sheaffer nib grade could fall in the 1970s that RonZ pinned at the top of the 'Repair Q&A' board, here ↓ ...

 

...and, from reading that, I found that my experience would indeed be in-line with a nib that falls within the range that Sheaffer was defining as an 'F' nib in the 1970s.

 

But, in another thread recently, I learned from LizEF that her Sheaffer 'Icon' writes with a line that she perceives to be narrower than the usual one for pens/nibs marked with that grade.

 

I know (from personal experience with pens that were made by Parker and by Pelikan across the late-Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries) that manufacturers can 'move the goalposts' over the decades; that what is marked 'F' in one era might be more like the next era's 'EF', or a width that what was once marketed as a 'B' may in future be marketed as an 'M'.

So, I would now like to ask whether anyone who is reading this has any lists that show the ranges within which Sheaffer's different nib grades have been defined in other decades, e.g.s

 

• 1930s
• 1940s
• 1950s
• 1960s
• 1970s - ✓ - see the thread I linked-to above.
• 1980s
• 1990s
• 2000s
• 2010s
• 2020s.

 

If anyone does have access to legitimate sources of this information, I would be very grateful if they would please add it/them to this thread, in order to facilitate easy future reference.

Slàinte,
M.

[Ron Z]

What I can tell you is that the nib gauges were were still in use when Richard Binder and I visited the Sheaffer service center and nib department just before the factory closed these last two departments in 2008.  They still had some of the nib tipping/slitting equipment set up, but I don't think that they were doing much in house nib manufacturing, if any.  By the time we were there, most of the factory was empty.

[Mercian]

Thank you for that Ron

 

It would seem then that Sheaffer sized their nibs consistently during the whole period in which they were being made in the US.

I wonder if the new owners have recently made a conscious decision to make the nib-grades on their pens more like those on Asian pens 🤔
After all, that's the part of the world in which the largest markets for FPs currently exist.

[gmark_wa]

On 11/9/2024 at 10:59 PM, Ron Z said:

What I can tell you is that the nib gauges were were still in use when Richard Binder and I visited the Sheaffer service center and nib department just before the factory closed these last two departments in 2008.  They still had some of the nib tipping/slitting equipment set up, but I don't think that they were doing much in house nib manufacturing, if any.  By the time we were there, most of the factory was empty.

Hello Ron.

Do you know the detail of how the nib gauges worked?  Did they measure the width of the tipping at a set depth?  And if so, what depth?

This is relevant because on at least some of the Sheaffer nibs the tip and tipping are angled.  
For example, where would they measure the tip width on the Palladium Triumph nib in the attached photo (the grid is 0.1 mm)?
Regards Mark.