The Soyuz "Moskva" fountain pen

This is the "Moskva" fountain pen, made in the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) Soyuz factory in the erstwhile USSR, one of very few fountain pen models that came with gold nibs. These were meant for high ranking party and government officials. The shape is clearly an inspiration from the well-known Parker '51' of that time. The cap is a push- or friction fit similar to the '51' and has a somewhat similar aerometric filling system, an accordion filler that I have seen in French-made pens from the 1950s. A blind cap hides a transparent button that is repeatedly pushed to draw ink which can then be visible by tilting the pen around.

 

 

 

The most unique feature is obviously the cap, which unfortunately has a few dents. The clip has the factory name and logo: Soyuz with a 'C' within a horizontal diamond shape. There is an elaborate overlay of the Kremlin on the side crowned with a ruby-like stone inside a star. The building walls surround the cap lip giving it a very unique look. The cap jewel is a 'jewel' a decorative stone that looks like a ruby. I have heard that it was said to be an actual ruby, which I dont' find too believable, given the size of the stone.

The pen barrel itself is plastic. It was heavily scratched when I received it many months ago, waiting to be polished, which was only done this weekend. 

  

 

 

The gold nib has a date stamp of 69 on the centre below the diamond shaped factory logo. There is an inversed 3 (the letter E in Cyrillic, I'm told) enclosed in a circle, with the number 6 below it, on one side. The other side has a purity mark that is barely legible: A rectangle which encloses what looks like a hammer and sickle within a star with the numbers 583 next to it. The nib itself is springy and seems to have a bit of flex. The hooded nib prevents the nib from flexing once in place. The nib is soft and smooth to write (dip tested only). The accordion sac, tested with water, works perfectly and has not hardened at all but it needs to be cleaned thoroughly inside.

An interesting bit of Soviet history. 

 There are a couple more examples of Soviet Russian fountain pens which I will post about soon.

Unnamed European vintage pens with DOM nibs

Some time ago, purely on a whim, I bought some old pens advertised for repair or parts. The lot comprised of 6 fountain and 2 roller ball pens. Last week when I received them, I thought I'd have a project for this weekend but what I got was quite a surprise. The 4 pens that I had specifically looked forward to weren't really parts pens at all. The simply looked made, and then for some reason, forgotten. The were unused, and the internal parts were 'dusty', for want of a better word. There was no residue of ink, not even when I pulled out the nib and feed to wash them. These were button fillers and only one pen lacked the blind cap.

So I cleaned up the pens with water and a stiff brush and assembled the feed and nib in each of the pens. I found that the spares from my Imperial pens purchase had a blind cap that fit the pen that was missing one.

 

The real surprise though was the nib. It was marked DOM 1st QUAL and 94 inside a box. It turned out to be the most soft and juicy steel flex nib I have used. The nib flexes without any conscious effort and reminds me of vintage dip nibs I have used. The feed that came with the pen seems to keep up with the flow no matter how fast I do the figures of eight. I have not experienced any railroading at all in the course of several pages of scribbling and testing. 

 

I thought theses were made of celluloid but I'm told that these are more likely Bakelite. The pens themselves seem to be cheaply made and the only reason they seem to be in such good condition is because they have most likely never been used. 

 

Since the pens themselves have no markings on them whatsoever I tried to find info on the nibs, marked DOM. I did not find any information on this particular brand online anywhere at all. I finally came across a tiny bit of history attached to the description on a sale post on an auction site. The pen for sale was advertised as a DOM pen and below is part of the description:

"...vintage DOM fountain pen from Germany. DOM were a small German affair from the town of Cologne concerned in the manufacture of fountain pens. More widely known local manufacturers such as Soennecken located in nearby Bonn crowded out the likes of DOM, who were forced to finally close shop by the end of WW2."

If the nibs I have are from the same company described above, it's a pity they went out of business. I don't know if these are DOM pens or not, but I'm glad they turned out to be more than parts' pens!

 

Please click on images for larger version.

 

An Indian ebonite ED stylographic conversion

My experiment for this week.

Recently I got hold of some stylographic pens called Imperial made by a Czech now-defunct company called J. Brod & Co. These were wartime production pens and none of the piston filler mechanisms work, but that is for later. The seller kindly included a bunch of spare and broken parts as a free gift so my brain went on overdrive wondering what to do with them since they could not help me fix the piston filler units anyway. 

 

 

After thinking a while, I looked through my 'experiment' pens and decided to try a conversion. There were a couple of sections among the spares with no broken bits so I took one apart and gave it a thorough cleaning. The most important part, the weighted wire, was thankfully OK. One of the pens, an eyedropper, had a barrel that fit the section readily. I think it is a Woodex, before it became Woodex. I applied some silicon grease to the threads and here we are! It remains to be seen how this setup will deal with burping, if it occurs.

 

I'm fascinated by the simplicity of the mechanism, considering that the main parts involved are the weighted wire that regulates the ink flow, and the section tip (which itself can be disassembled from the section) that's similar to a roller ball but without the ball. It's surprisingly smooth with absolutely no scratchiness on paper.

 

 

 

These are the basic parts. Of course the main piston unit is still attached.

 

 

Here you see the tip, the weighted wire that is inside, and the section itself.

 

The tip itself is interesting. There is a channel along the threads that looked like a crack to me initially. Then I realized that it must be an air channel for the ink to be drawn in as the tiny mouth would be too narrow for that purpose. When I was priming the eyedropper, the ink was expelled from the very edge of the conical part.

Unnamed bakelite pen with a Rupp nib

A restoration from this weekend. An unnamed French (?) pen c. 1940 in Bakelite with gold plated trims. This is a fairly large button filler pen. It needed a new sac and only a light clean and polish.

It sports a steel nib with an imprint of a lion within a circle with the words Iridium Tipped surrounding it and looks to be a Rupp nib. (From what I have been able to find out, Georg Peter Rupp was a nib maker in Heidelberg from 1920's to 1970.)

 

Please click on images for larger version.

 

Sheaffer Lifetime Green Jade

A Sheaffer Lifetime white dot in jade green. Conflicting specifications of the pen makes it difficult for me to fix a date to it. I would say this pen is from sometime in the late '30s. It's the flat top Lifetime with the white dot on the top of the cap. It also has the later deep multi-finned feed design.

The colour has obviously faded. The trims also shows considerably plating loss, especially the cap ring. When I got this pen it needed a service and restoration. Decades of dried ink had to be removed and a new sac has to be put in. Unfortunately I didn't have the proper sized sac for this large pen so a slightly smaller one (#18) had been used.

 

It had a lovely large nib which writes smoothly but with considerable feedback.

 

Edit: I'm told this pen is sometime from between 1924 to 1928 as it has a single cap band. From 1928 onward till 1934 approximately they had dual cap bands. The feed is from later on, from '38 or '39, possibly a later replacement.

 

Please click on the images for larger version.