This morning I went into a specialist pen shop to see about buying a Parker piston converter. The shop clerk I spoke with showed me two converters, one on a Parker printed card and in a plastic bubble, the other free-standing in a little transparent envelope. She said Parker made two piston converters, one in plastic, the other in glass, the glass one being superior. (And priced higher.)

The only two Parker converters I know about are a slide converter, so called, and a piston converter, both made of plastic. The piston converter has a screw and a piston seal, like the ones found in pre-c/c pens. Does Parker also make a glass converter? Might be fragile, but might avoid ink adhering to the walls of the converter.

Does any manufacturer make a glass converter that fits Parker and Aurora pens?

You may advise me that if I am old enough to disbelieve clerks in computer stores I am old enough to expect just about anything at all to come out of the mouths of pen-shop staff, but I am idealistic for my age. Also, I would really love to know that there *are* Parker glass converters, no more ink-flow problems, converter not fragile, don't worry, be happy.

The piston and slide converters are the only things I have heard of. Were both of the coverters you saw pistons? I know the slide converter has a more "plastic" look to it, which is of no consequence to me as I like both styles. But an unknowledgeable sales clerk might assume the piston to be glass and the slide to be plastic.

I am very interested in what others have to say about this topic.

Parker does not make a glass converter. Apart from being rather impractical and not offering any real advantage over a plastic version the safety implications are horrendous.

Note that the "Pump" (ie slide) converter is generally sold via the retail chain and comes in a blister pack. The "Piston" (ie screw) converter does not have any packaging as it is sold as a spare part.

Martin

These are enlightening responses. I hadn't imagined that the slide converter might come in a Parker plastic bubble cum cardboard display wrapping, while the twist converter might not come the same way. While I was in the pen shop I feared that the twist converter might not be a Parker product and might not fit my pen, although it might be an Aurora product that would fit my pen. Or some kind of third-party product that would fit the pen.

In my case things are a bit less simple than I'd like them to be. The pen in question is an Aurora 88 small fountain pen. "Small" appears to be Aurora's own designation, and it is smaller than its piston-filling big brother. The inside of the barrel is narrow enough so that although a Parker cartridge fits easily, a rubber Parker squeeze converter that I have does not fit. The ink-bearing part of that converter is narrow enough to fit, but then at the business end there is a metal collar too wide for the barrel.

I'm not even sure that Parker's twist converter would fit. The slide converter, which would almost surely be narrow enough if it's narrow enough for the Parker 180, looks too downmarket to go with an Aurora 88. Or anything else I own. It seems to have been designed so as to push the user toward buying more expensive products.

Glass did seem implausible. But I should think glass would be superior to the current kind of plastic, in being less likely to cause the stoppages of ink flow too often reported by people who use c/c pens. Ink hanging up in the distal end of the cartridge. Ball bearing required to break surface tension.

Would that happen with glass? If it's only a matter of the physics of a narrow cylinder, yes. But if it's a matter of the surface characteristics of different materials, presumably not. It certainly does not happen with my rubber squeeze converter, which is working without ball bearing or sudden stoppages in a handsome UK Parker 45 TX.

I should think the reason glass converters are not made is as much to do with production costs (as usual) as it might be to do with safety. A fairly delicate item to make, and then a higher likelihood of breakages in the distribution process.

I had a similar fitting problem with the Aurora I acquired recently. The Parker slide converter will fit, the screw version will not. However, I notice that The Writing Desk sell a press-bar converter that looks quite narrow: Aurora converter

I have Parker Frontiers with the slide type, and Sonnets with the screw type. The screw type is a better looking product.

Besides being cheaper, the slide type is a little smaller. At the base where it fits on the section, the difference is tiny, but it is smaller.

As you move away from the section, the step-down in diameter occurs sooner, and is greater on the slide type. (Enough that it must hold less ink.) If either would fit, I would always prefer the screw type. However, I can imagine tapered barrels where the slide type fits and the screw type doesn't (the Frontier barrel is bigger than Sonnet; there it was chosen because it is cheap)

In spite of looking cheap, the slide type works just fine in my Frontiers.

O I of little faith! I've been seeing The Writing Desk's offering of Aurora converters for not quite donkeys' years, TWD not having been at this since time immemorial, but for some time now. Everywhere else that sells Aurora converters has a picture of a piston (twist) converter, it seems to me. So I've assumed that the picture on TWD's Web site dates back to a long-past age when Aurora actually did press-bar converters. No thought on my part that TWD is currently selling them.

I shall have to launch an inquiry with the firm itself. Possibly ask local informants whether all of Aurora's dealers actually sell both types of converter but advertise only the type with the screw. Truly I thought Aurora press-bar converters were by now lost in the mists of time.

About whether my Aurora pen's barrel will turn out to be too narrow for the press-bar converter even if I could buy one, I shall daydream hopefully for a few days longer. Unless someone knows.

Jerome wrote:

"The slide converter, which would almost surely be narrow enough if it's narrow enough for the Parker 180, looks too downmarket to go with an Aurora 88."

Goodness, don't let that be an issue! I use Parker's slide converters because I like them, and I use them in my Sonnets and Duofolds. I kind of like the slide converter because it is easy to clean and maintain.

Could the twist converters be the "glass" converters the shop clerk was referring to?

I just took out my Parker twist converter, and from touching its texture and looking at its lustre, I could see that it could be easily mistaken as glass, than plastic.

First, thank you all for your well-thought-out and, I trust, practical replies. Where I am now is that, having read the assertion that Martin and Anna Roberts at The Writing Desk sell an Aurora press-bar converter, I have asked TWD if it's true. I await their reply. That would be the most direct solution of my problem. I have also looked into buying a really slim Parker press-bar converter of yesteryear. I'm now using a Parker cartridge in my Aurora 88, and if the cartridge fits the Aurora nipple I feel some confidence that a converter will also fit. Length and thickness are other considerations, though.

As for being told in a pen shop that the Parker twist converter is made of glass because it looks like glass, being shiny and transparent, I agree. The obvious guess on my part was that I had been misinformed. That is good to know, so that I can better appraise other information from the same source. Truly I would rather people knew the obvious things about the merchandise they sell.

But it might have been true that the transparent-looking converter wasn't from Parker, that it was made of glass (unlikely, but I don't know everything), and that I have a buying choice I didn't previously know about. If The Writing Desk sells a press-bar converter from Aurora, not the twist converter everyone else appears to be offering, that's another thing I hadn't known about.

Rendered just that bit more plausible if Aurora still manufactures the Hastil, because that pen requires a narrower converter than usual. Might be that Aurora still makes the narrow squeeze converter to go with the Hastil. I live in ignorance.

Again, thank you all. (And I am keeping an open mind about the Parker slide converter at least for rinsing my pen, even if I use cartridges for their larger ink capacity.)