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.)

 

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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.