Just acquired a Parker Vac, 4 3/4" capped, blue striped, double black jewel, date code 0. . Filler unit says "To fill pump 9 times" and on the other side of the slit "Pause between strokes". The Q's---how common, uncommon are these? Are they more likely to occur on "late" productions?

Pictures would help a lot....
I have never seen a Parker Vacumatic with filling instructions on the filler unit...

From your limited description this sounds like a 2nd Gen Debutante. Is the marking stamped into the filler, or is it a label or sticker which was applied. I seem to recall seeing a filler with a label on it, but most likely David I will pop in here and show us an image of one in totally mint condition. The 0.. date code is 2nd Quarter 1940 not especially late for a Vac. Canadian Vacs were made into the 50's.

Would love to see an image of your pen there Fred.

Cheers,
Sean

Hello---Not a label--stamped on/printed on the speedline filler in blue ink. No DC therefore no pics. Out of the hundreds of Vac speedline fillers I've seen, this is the first time I've seen instructions printed on the filler unit but perhaps that's too small a sample size. I've been surprised before. Perhaps other have more experience than I? Oh, date code is 0, one dot = (0.). The second dot was the period at the end of the sentence.

It's sort of a blue stencil. Might correlate to fillers also with diamond stamped (not colored) in the brass mushroom at back of pump. These seem to go with first year 51's and crop up on vacs 1940-1 or so. Have owned a few. Neat when found.

best

d

David, Right on! The "mushroom" on the speedline filler does have the diamond impression stamped in/on it. Yup, it is neat! Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Hello All,

I had one before, but decided to sell it. This one falls in the "why the heck did I sell that?" bin, more so because if I remember correctly I didn't do too well with it. Anyways here's a picture of the filler unit on the pen.
Click to view attachment
I'm sure there are some more out there, I was just surprised to see it on mine as it was the 1st I had encountered too, well at least at that time.

Pearce.