This weekend is the last time we'll see the presidential candidates here in New Hampshire. That is a good thing; they've had their campaign machines calling, canvassing, and broadsiding us for months, and they've been holding rallies -- at least two will be here in Nashua today. Saints preserve us from any more of this foolishness!
This all has little or nothing to do with pens beyond the fact that with all the political garbage on teevee there's time to do real work instead of rotting one's cerebral cortex in front of the idiot box.
Saturday I had the great pleasure of working on a pen that is very uncommon, if not downright rare. Back before World War II, about the time Neville Chamberlain went to Munich and came home spouting his "peace in our time" foolishness, JiF Waterman of France developed a cartridge-filling fountain pen. This pen used glass cartridges, and the design was a good one. But the effort was curtailed by the war. It appears not to have died a-borning, however, because there exist a few of these lovely glass-cartridge pens. One of these, a Duo-7, showed up here a while ago with a query as to whether it could be made serviceable.
Well, there isn't a supply of cartridges for these pens, so it became a question of how to adapt one for some other cartridges -- or perhaps a converter. Saturday I adapted the pen, turning it into a captive-converter "piston" filler by installing a Sailor converter. The pen has a rubber collar at the back of the section to secure the cartridge at that end and prevent leaks; the converter is a perfect fit there. The piston-filler model works amazingly well, actually, because the Duo-7 screws apart not only at the section joint but also midway along its barrel's length. The original design has a conical coil spring in the blind cap, with a soft rubber cap to force the cartridge firmly against the section, and I had to remove the spring. (The rubber piece was powder.) By machining a press-fit polystyrene collar to retain the converter and keep it solidly centered, I've created a design that works well -- and it looks and feels "commercial." If the converter ever fails, as sometimes does happen, replacing it will be dead simple.
Best of all, no damage was done to the pen. I'll return the spring to the owner along with the pen so that the pen could, if desired, be returned to its original state (less the dead rubber piece, which can be replaced with a functional, if not identical, substitute).
The pen's nib is a keyhole No 7, marked WATERMAN'S IDEAL Duo-7 18 Carats, and it's very similar to a RED No 7 in behavior. I think this pen's owner will be a happy camper. I know I am!