A Problem With My New Targa

[miket_nyc]

I was visiting some dealer friends last weekend and they'd just gotten in some pens. Some were in bad shape, but I wound up buying a near-mint Targa, black with gold ends, with a medium 14k nib. Apparently some of these took regular Skrip cartridges, but this one takes the discontinued slim ones (but it came with two spares and a converter).

 

The pen writes really well but it has one problem: the cap doesn't stay on as tightly as I'd like, and the pen has already fallen off the cap once in my pocket. The gold ring on the barrel with the three little bumps seems rather worn. Does anyone know how you can remove this, or if Schaeffer makes the part?

[Ron Z]

Sheaffer discontinued the slim Targa a decade or two ago. I don't remember coming across any clutch rings for the slim Targa back in 2008 when sorting Sheaffer parts while they were in Philadelphia. Regular Targa parts, yes. Slim Targa, in general, no.

 

It may be possible to disassemble the writing unit and push the bumps in the clutch ring out a bit to tighten the fit in the cap. A word of caution though. The plastic on the slim Targa sections is very thin. It cracks very easily, and because it the pen wasn't made for very log, there are relatively few replacement sections available. You may want to leave this to someone with a fair bit of experience in pen repair who has the "hands" to do the work to lower the chances of it breaking.

[ink-syringe]

FYI. I think Peytonstreetpens has slim Targa Sections.

 

Though I have seen whole Targas go for less. Though with used Targas always comes a risk that the metal inside the pen is corroded or that the inlaid nib is leaking very slowly, or that the plating on the pen has all worn off. etc, & co.

[miket_nyc]

Thanks, at least I now know the part is called a "clutch ring." But I solved the problem last night, at least temporarily, by making a little plastic spacer so the barrel of the pen won't screw on so far. It's about 1/16" wide and the result is that when you put the cap on, the clutch ring goes further up into the cap and holds better.

[miket_nyc]

I was surprised today to find that the change I made to my slimline Targa above essentially made the cap closure like the one on a regular Targa . As the pictures here show,one of the changes Sheaffer made for the slimline Targa was to move the clutch ring closer to the joint between the cap and the pen (http://dirck.delint.ca/beta/?page_id=6221) I made the plastic spacer for my pen because I discovered that the cap would stay on fine if I unscrewed the barrel a little bit, giving the clutch ring more of the cap to get a grip on. So my pen now looks like the slimline in the bottom picture with the clutch ring location of the Targas above it.

 

This makes me wonder if the change in the clutch ring spacing was a styling one done without proper testing to see if the cap gripped as well as before. Did the caps on slimline Targas tend to fall off more than on regular Targas, and did this contribute to the discontinuation of the slimline pens?

[miket_nyc]

In case anyone's interested, here's a photo of my Targa with the spacer to retain the cap better by increasing the distance between the clutch ring and the end of the cap. The spacer is plastic and doesn't have the same gloss of the rest of the pen, but it's so small that it's not noticeable. (The dull area on the right is a tab made of tap that I put on pens to keep them from rolling when I put them down, because I never post the cap on pens).

[mitto]

Good solution. Out of the box. Enjoy your pen.