Old pen #1
Since you can pretty much find anything on the internet, it didn't take me long to find something shiny: a lovely striped brown pen with gold trimmings. Three days later I found myself staring at a tiny golden nib, that appeared to have the Bock logo on it. The pen itself has no markings, so I'm not sure where it's from or who made it. When shaken, it made a nasty rattling sound, which suggested the filling mechanism had seen better days. It did write quite nicely when dipped though, so I had high hopes for it.
Let's have a look inside
After a thorough soaking, the pen revealed its secrets: it's a button filler, with a pulverised ink sac and a severely mistreated pressure bar.
Fixing it up
All in all I think I got pretty lucky with my first pen. It took quite a bit of work to get the remnants of the ink sac out, but that was really the hardest part. With the tools we had, we managed to straighten and reshape the pressure bar and The Pendragons were able to provide us with a new ink sac and the shellac needed to seal it in place. After that, all this tiny beauty needed was a bit of a polish and a minor adjustment of the tines, as it felt scratchy when moving upward right.
The test: will it write?
Time to bring out the ink! I choose Pelikan's Edelstein Smoky Quartz, my go-to brown ink. I have quite high expectations as I lower the pen in the bottle and press the filler button. Victory!! A satisfying bubbly sound tells me the air is being pushed out of the sac and I wait a few seconds for it to fill with ink. After just a few downstrokes the nib picks up and starts writing beautifully. I'm not used to such a tiny nib, but it feels quite pleasant and I even dare to try if there is any line variation in it. Pretty pen has no problem with that and nearly doubles its line width, just for fun. All in all I'm pretty pleased with this project and can't wait to start a new one!
