On advance, my apologies if this has been discused already. The search function of the forum rejects words shorter than four chars, so "dry" and "51" were a no-no, and the issue seems specific to this model.
The pen. Very nice 1944 full size vacumatic. The nib writes a very dry line, even after tweaking it. In fact, it writes gloriously without the hood, but as soon as I put the hood on the flow becomes miserable.
I suspect the hood is putting some kind of pressure on the nib, reducing the flow. How can I fix that?

You can do a search on short words by using quotes around the word or phrase and including a space in front and after the three letter word, I believe.

As to the pen, the hood can be shrunken a bit, or it could have some insoluble material that interferes with flow of ink down the slit. Make sure it's clean, and then ask Old Griz or Richard Binder how to adjust the hood -- I've not had to do that with any of mine yet.

Peter