George Kovalenko used the name "Gravity Filler" for these pens in his Fountain Pen Taxonomy article over on Lion & Pen. I've tried to collect these pens for several years, but they are rather hard to find even here in Japan.
I do not like the name "Gravity Filler" These pens are actually Gravity Assisted Capillary Fillers, but mostly I prefer Namiki's name for these pens "Drink Fillers"
Out of sheer dumb luck, I managed to stumble upon my greatest pen find ever. I bought what I thought was a 1930's eyedropper maki-e pen. However, I quickly discovered that the pen had no blind cap as the usual eyedropper pens have, and no lever. I started to get excited. I carefully removed the section unit and discovered that it was a maki-e drink filler.
I showed images of the pen to my friends at the PIlot Pen museum, and they were floored. They had heard about these maki-e drink filler pens, but thought that they were all lost. They were never sold on the market. The War crept up on Pilot and ceased production of the maki-e pen department just as this project had started. The seller from whom I bought the pen said he bought it from an elderly lady in Zushi, Japan. He wouldn't give me her name, but my Pilot friends were rather sure it was the widow of Mr. Watanabe, one of Pilot's old managers who recently passed away.
I'll have a full article on these interesting pens on Lion & Pen soon, but I wanted to share the images for Pentraces Sac-less self filler day.
Stay Well
Dr. Ron Dutcher
http://www.kamakurapens.com
http://www.lionandpen.com
