Geekiness Update

What's more geeky than vintage fountain pens? Vintage stylographic pens! More geeky, less loved. Eventually evolved into modern Rapidograph pens, when they no longer got any respect as writing instruments. I've got a vintage Ink-o-graph coming, as well as 2 actual Koh-i-nor Rapidographs. (Those can't be vintage, though. They've only been made for 30 years. If it was made in my lifetime, it's not vintage, dammit! ^_~) Also in that lot was the virtually unheard of Ink-o-graph fountain pen, the Ink-D-Cator. Pretty, though; a nice marbled red.

I also went and proved my theory that it can be cheaper to buy an Esterbrook pen with the Renew-point nib you want, than it is to buy the nib alone. Got a red Esterbrook J with a 2048 flexible nib coming as well. One of the photos made it look as though the outside of the barrel were stained with ink. If it's just an optical illusion and the barrel's fine, perk! If not, I bought it for the nib, so no biggie.

My restored Esterbrook SJ from Richard Binder did arrive, but I haven't inked it up yet. It has the default 1550 nib, which no one likes. No tip on it, so it tends to be scratchy. I did a dip test with it, making sure to soak the feed this time (figured out what was wrong with my dip tests), and it was terrible. I may eventually ink it up anyway to see how it performs with a full sac behind it, but I'm trying to empty out some of the pens I have inked now, so no sense adding another to the rotation.

I also started pulling apart some of the junker pens I already have to fix them up, although the sacs won't arrive until sometime later this week. One is a green stripe-y Diamond that I bet has an amusing story behind how it ended up in someone's junk drawer. When I cleaned it out, there was a ton of dried ink in the barrel and a positively ungodly amount in the cap (I'm still trying to clean out the cap, actually). On that one, also, what I thought was a badly gunked up steel nib turned out to be an even more gunked up yellow metal; I'm guessing brass. Looks pretty nice now, although there seem to be some burrs or something stuck in the nib slit. :P

One think I note about the fountain pen fandom, especially vintage pens, is that prices seem to be all over the board. For example, take the Parker 51, a relatively common but highly desired vintage pen. I've seen working 51s go anywhere from $35 to $200. The condition and restorer have some effect on it, but there doesn't seem to my untrained eye to be $165 of variation there. It's certainly not obvious to a noob what, if anything, causes it.

Actually, this brings up another acquisition that is on its way to me. I got it in my head that I wanted a Shaeffer snorkel. At the same time, four of them came up for sale over 2 days, so I was able to get one pretty reasonably. (I'd like to say it was serendipity, but actually, the first one that went up is what gave me a craving for one. ^_^;) Ironically, one of the reasons I want one is to get ink out of the little sample bottles I like to get from Pear Tree, and yet I don't think I'd have the guts to run a lot of those through a Snorkel. ^_^; But it's got the coolest filling system in the whole world, dammit! And that's enough!

I've also developed an irrational hatred of Wearever pens. I've been joking that the only good Wearever is a dead Wearever. Which isn't quite how I feel, but... Well, while a Wearever in an eBay lot isn't a show stopper, it is a mark against it.