Developing An Aversion For Lever Fillers?

[ethernautrix]

I don't like lever fillers -- or pens with sacs in general -- and much prefer c/c and piston fillers (such as mentioned above, models that have an easily removable nib for very fast cleaning and filling with a syringe).

 

I've tried many appealing vintage pens, but I just don't like the fuss with sacs or, with lever fillers, the lever sticking me under a fingernail.

 

I finally realized the underlying reason: I am much more capricious about inks than I believed and so tend to change them more often, sometimes after only a couple of hours after a fill. Using c/c and some piston fillers makes that process faster, less fussy.

[Orpilorp]

... I am much more capricious about inks than I believed and so tend to change them more often, sometimes after only a couple of hours after a fill....

 

All ink merchants love you.

[ink-syringe]

I <3 lever fillers and actively seek them out.

[Pickwick]

Depends on how well maintained it was....Bluey had bad luck...to buy from someone who didn't care...had not personally re-saced his pen...so didn't see the J-bar was rotted out.

It's like putting a new head gasket on a motor one yanks out to look at.

Part and parcel of restoring.

 

I would expect any properly re-sacked pen to work...The only problem is the new sac's are not quite the 30-40 year sacs of yesteryear.

 

I'm down to four lever....two for my wife....Wearevers... A pencil and ink pen combo....and a turquoise in she likes that color...basic 70's pen...not as robust as a Esterbrook....a DJ Copper and a SJ marbled blue.

Remember when falling down the stairs...don't fall on that Wearever. You can fall on the Esterbrook though.

 

I had some 15 lever pens***...but I grew up with lever pens and the Snorkel...P-51 is a lot more work than a lever pen. It's as bad as one of them Cartridge pens.

 

*** Eventually one realizes one needs too many Esties to have one of each color...then that leads to each color in each size and so on. Single J had four of them.

I also had some nice solid Wearever pens of the late '30-40's. I set them all free.

 

Of course if you have a collection of Venus pens.....remember don't sit down too fast if one is in your shirt pocket........Well they survived often a year of school kid use...so can't be as delicate as I think....a cheap Wearever was the better pen.

 

With all the over flushing going for frequent color changes demanding purity of the same, it's hardly surprising lever fill pens fail, especially the ones that had given faithful service for many years and never intended for such treatment!

 

These pens were made for a generation of writers who never used them as play things.

[ethernautrix]

All ink merchants love you.

 

The feeling is mutual, even though I'm hardly competition for the ink mavens around here. I've finally made the association between KWZ Inks and what I'll call the Egon Schiele palette which has a triggered a plan.

[Orpilorp]

I <3 lever fillers and actively seek them out.

+1. I seek them out too. I've found that many owners of junk stores think a pen is ruined when the lever doesn't want to cooperate, but we know better.

 

And off topic but I just need to share: a shop owner once gave me a perfect semi-flex Morrison because the cap was, so he thought, completely stuck. He didn't realize some caps are threaded.

Edited December 10, 2016 by Orpilorp

[inkstainedruth]

+1. I seek them out too. I've found that many owners of junk stores think a pen is ruined when the lever doesn't want to cooperate, but we know better.

 

And off topic but I just need to share: a shop owner once gave me a perfect semi-flex Morrison because the cap was, so he thought, completely stuck. He didn't realize some caps are threaded.

 

Nice score! That may make you "Sumgai of the Week!"

My only issue with lever fillers are, like pajaro, getting the little end of the lever up. And -- especially with ringtops like most of my Morrisons -- getting the lever open enough when filling if the ink bottle or sample vial isn't all the way to the top because the pen is so small (I suspect I'll have even more trouble with a 3 inch long Arnold mini, once I get it resacced...).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[praxim]

I have one particular lever filler, a little Onoto 21, where lifting the lever is best done with one of those tiny hard plastic spreaders used for getting apart phones and the like. Anything harder will damage the pen of course, while my aged male nail will hardly fit without being forced into the gap, risking metal-under-fingernail pain.

 

I could always take to sharpening one fingernail into a nice flat chisel edge, of course.

[Bo Bo Olson]

It appears, one should wander a well designed route for changing inks in a lever pen....my brown ink only? pen ....and a plan to go from dark to light and very light....and from there to a dark blue....working to the light and bright ones. Then a jump into a purple....

And so on.

 

I never had such a great problem...clean the pen well (never seen that as impossible or even hard(of course way back then...7-8 years ago, there were not persistent rumors of how horrible a lever pen was....too many folks had seen and used one who are now passed. )....give it a shake, let it like ALL other pens spend a night in a paper towel.

 

I have not found 'ink contamination' from what little is still left in/on what ever nib...CC, Piston, or Lever when ready to go inking the next day. A lot of folks are a bit OCD (to be polite) than necessary with inks. As long as one is not using something like R&K Sepia in the pen before...any like ink...ie shading ink will wash out enough.

Most supersaturated ones too....though like some piston pens.....supersaturated inks should be cleaned out more often. CC pens are easier to force dead ink out of them by rubber bulb...do clean up easier. A needle syringe is good for cleaning out a converter or cartridge.

Did anyone mention how much time that takes compared to 20 lever flicks??????

 

If one is paranoid there is JB pen flush.

[Pickwick]

It appears, one should wander a well designed route for changing inks in a lever pen....my brown ink only? pen ....and a plan to go from dark to light and very light....and from there to a dark blue....working to the light and bright ones. Then a jump into a purple....

And so on.

 

I never had such a great problem...clean the pen well (never seen that as impossible or even hard(of course way back then...7-8 years ago, there were not persistent rumors of how horrible a lever pen was....too many folks had seen and used one who are now passed. )....give it a shake, let it like ALL other pens spend a night in a paper towel.

 

I have not found 'ink contamination' from what little is still left in/on what ever nib...CC, Piston, or Lever when ready to go inking the next day. A lot of folks are a bit OCD (to be polite) than necessary with inks. As long as one is not using something like R&K Sepia in the pen before...any like ink...ie shading ink will wash out enough.

Most supersaturated ones too....though like some piston pens.....supersaturated inks should be cleaned out more often. CC pens are easier to force dead ink out of them by rubber bulb...do clean up easier. A needle syringe is good for cleaning out a converter or cartridge.

Did anyone mention how much time that takes compared to 20 lever flicks??????

 

If one is paranoid there is JB pen flush.

"...too many folks had seen and used one who are now passed..." There are still a few of us left, my dear friend.

[Bo Bo Olson]

Well back in the day, and it was still One Man, One Pen, when the 'convenience' of the cartridge and Diner's Card came in....one did need Diner's Card in paying for the convenience of cartridge, money was short.

Go eat at places you can't afford and pay for it next month....stupid then, and now. But who in his right mind could have conceived of the credit card world today...and no lever pens.

 

Convenience...too forgetful to to fill at home, or buy a bottle of ink for the office desk....and it was High Status of course....I got the new nifty spin it open like a P-51 and shove a cartridge in it, pen.

None noticed there were few colors in few used more than the basic red, blue and black...outside of women/girlies.

It took years before it picked on poor innocent school kids.

 

It was a great way to sell very expensive ink...and lever pens were so expensive to make....the J-bar, the sac...hand work.=$$$$.

So price the cheap to make cartridge pen high...because the poor can't afford it's cartridge. The idea was not to sell the pen, but to sell the cartridge. Still is.

 

Mary Antoinette never said let them eat cake. Did Parker say let the poor use ball points? IMO the high price of cartridges almost lead to it's extinction...only the converter saved it.

 

Click and go....was so much cheaper than an expensive rich folks cartridge. I could afford a dime Coke, a big nickle snickers or baseball cards....or #1 Spidie, that I folded up, put in my back pocket and swapped for next to nothing.

I had discovered where I could get 10 BP refills for only 10 cents. therefor I had a social life...swapped baseball cards, hung around with the gang drinking one Coke once a week or walked a mile for a 16 oz Royal Crown....with the rich kids who got 50 cents a week allowance.

[displacermoose]

I don't find the extra time cleaning a lever filler to be a draw back. I like performing pen maintenance. There is something soothing about watching the dribbles of ink swirl through the water. I have enough pens that I rarely fill a pen immediately after cleaning it (there is always another waiting for its turn) so the cleaning ritual is rather like giving it a bath before putting it to bed. And replacing a sac every once in a while is easy-peasy.

 

As for them not feeling sturdy, that isn't something that I worry about. Of course, none of my vintage pens (I have 7 or 8) are particularly valuable and all of them have flaws. I don't feel bad for using them because that's what they are for and what they've been doing for the past 40-90 years. A few more micro-scratches isn't an issue. I did have a Skyline for a while (beautiful pen), but the barrel shattered after a drop of 3 feet on to a rug. I'm not going to replace it because I collect pens to use, not just to look at, and those are too fragile for me to be comfortable with. I'd much rather have an Estie that can land nib down on concrete and be perfectly fine after some TLC with a whetstone and some micromesh. Not that I'd ever willingly do that again, but not having to worry about it means that I'm perfectly comfortable carrying it around with me.

[JonSzanto]

I look at the many valued pens on my desk, and there are a *lot* of lever pens. I can see at least three that are constantly inked an in use, and simply are spectacular and comfortable writers (all Sheaffers from the 1920s-30s). I also have modern, non-lever pens that are less than a few months old.

 

I've gotten over the constant farting around with new inks, and for the inks I want to try out, I have plenty of c/c pens. My piston fillers and especially the lever pens are filled with inks I know, love, and use day in and day out. Lever fillers are no more difficult to clean than anything save a completely dismantleable (?) piston filler. Especially if you like to fill with the same ink, you only have occasional hygiene to take care of.

 

Not to mention that some people find the process of emptying, cleaning, and refilling a pen to be a relaxing and pleasant ritual. I'm rarely in a rush to do this.

 

Lever pens have been with us for at least a century. Sacs last many years between failures, and there are few pen repairs as easy. Few moving parts, little to break. I'm as thrilled to use and write with my 1929 Sheaffer Balance as my 2016 Aurora 88. Long live levers!

[Baalberithim]

I generally prefer a piston filler, but I don't outright dislike level fillers. I do find a lot of them to be a bit to small or light for my tastes though.

[bmillicent]

Maybe I'm just really OCD or odd or something . . .

 

I don't bother with the lever on my Esties - the wonderful nib assembly lets the pen function as an eyedropper without the burps, thanks to the sac. I can change ink colours on a whim.

 

Carts are okay on modern pens because I have so many diabetic friends and family. Refills aplenty thanks to U100 syringes. I even use a syringe to fill a converter. Less surface area to contaminate ink bottles.

[Bo Bo Olson]

One should post lever fillers...then they are longer than the Large pens many use unposted. Then they are not tooooooo Small.

If you worry about maring your pen...a bit of wax cures that.

 

I never understood why no guts cartridge pens had to be so Large...and therefore so heavy and so clunky.

IMO, I think it has to do with bling of status.

In the '50-60's when folks still wrote the whole day....light and nimble was IN.....heavy signature pens...not much that I can remember. I never saw a PFM in real life...just in Add's.

 

OK...I was totally shocked to find out the thin and elegant Snorkel was a Large pen...one with great balance. One posts one's Snorkel....of course.

 

When one looks at it...I hadn't expected the P-45 to be a Large pen also....but because of barrel shape don't appear so. Mine is a rolled gold cap...with good balance. Could be the plastic cap would give it even better balance.

Yes....of course I post it...or it would have poor balance. That is why again I'm surprised that it is a Large pen. Posted it has good balance.

[JonSzanto]

One should post lever fillers...then they are longer than the Large pens many use unposted. Then they are not tooooooo Small.

If you worry about maring your pen...a bit of wax cures that.

 

I never understood why no guts cartridge pens had to be so Large...and therefore so heavy and so clunky.

IMO, I think it has to do with bling of status.

In the '50-60's when folks still wrote the whole day....light and nimble was IN.....heavy signature pens...not much that I can remember. I never saw a PFM in real life...just in Add's.

 

OK...I was totally shocked to find out the thin and elegant Snorkel was a Large pen...one with great balance. One posts one's Snorkel....of course.

 

When one looks at it...I hadn't expected the P-45 to be a Large pen also....but because of barrel shape don't appear so. Mine is a rolled gold cap...with good balance. Could be the plastic cap would give it even better balance.

Yes....of course I post it...or it would have poor balance. That is why again I'm surprised that it is a Large pen. Posted it has good balance.

 

You should be more careful with language, and not confuse using the word large with a more appropriate term. The Sheaffer Snorkel is in no way a large pen, but it does seem long (though only by the most general standards).

 

Also, posting pens is both a very personal, and somewhat contentious, matter. Many, many threads on FPN bear testimony to this. I post some pens, I don't post others, but there are people that would be horrified to post any pen. Some lever fillers work better for me posted, some don't. It is rarely a case of the filling system, but the architecture, design, and size of the pen.

[rwilsonedn]

You guys who unscrew the removeable nib assemblies of your pens to clean them do realize that those threads are not intended for frequent use, right? Every cycle loosens them a bit more.

ron

[Bo Bo Olson]

Jon, many refuse to post any pen...then have the nerve to complain it's not big enough for them....when it is longer than any non posted Large or Giant pen.

Large pens....146, 800, Townsend. Giant pens which I have none....149/1000.

 

Where are you going to set the "Large" pen....but by length.

A standard pen can be wider than others. An MB 234 1/2 a standard pen has a wider girth than a Esterbrook or 400.

A Medium-large 600 Pelikan is wider than a medium large 400nn.

The 600 is a tick wider than a P-51 and If I remember right a medium-long P--51 is @ as wide as a 400nn. My nail P-51 is in cobweb corner...one of them.

 

I am glad you post which ever pen feels good to you, and don't post those who don't feel good. For some it is against their religion to post....and then comment it is too small for them. Yes, I know I repeat that.

 

I find out side of the Snorkel and the P-45 the other wider and as long Large pens outside the Waterman 52 that is a fairly wide Large pen......are too long and top heavy to post for best balance.

 

The vintage '50-60's medium-large 146 is better balanced for me, than the Large later 146.

That new 146 is OK posted....better than not. Posted it is better balanced than an unposted 800. An 800 is way too top heavy to post.

 

My 'Large' metal pens that I will use, are the thinner Pelikans from the '90's...Celebry or 381. I can post them with out second thought...or use them for short use non-posted.

 

I guess it also matters if you use classic tripod and or finger write or forefinger up like I do.

 

Large pens metal like heavy pens like a Persona or a Townsend...I find too short unposted and top heavy posted.

I find the Safari and Ahab a bit short unposted....and not quite as well balanced as they could be, posted...They will though rest in the pit of my thumb if I ask them too. Unposted I'd have to finger write or return to death grip heaven...the Classic Tripod...that goes for most of the 'Large' pens I have.

[JonSzanto]

Where are you going to set the "Large" pen....but by length.

 

Bo Bo, I don't want you to misunderstand me - I'm not upset that you write these long posts about these things, but I am trying to show you that there is an aspect of your use of English terms that makes for a confusing set of descriptive words.

 

A "large" pen would be oversized in every dimension and measurement: length, girth (width) and (possibly) weight. The part I quoted above is at the basis of your unclarity: if a pen has a greater-than-normal length, I would refer to it as long, not large. A Snorkel is a long pen, but it is not a large pen. It is narrow in width/girth, a slender pen that is also fairly light-weight. All one needs to do is look at the PFM, which is essentially a much wider and fatter Snorkel.

 

Whether a pen will be a better writing experience if it is posted is a combination of the dimensions and weight of the pen components, as well as the size of the hand and writing behavior of the user. I know that pens I prefer posted are pens that others have no problem writing with unposted. Quite simply, their hands are smaller. It is also well-known, on this list and elsewhere, that posting pens can raise issues of barrel wear and lip cracks, and many who accumulate pens not only for writing but also as collectibles are very, very hesitant to post many pens. I can understand that. For instance, one of my newest acquisitions is an Aurora 88 with a matte black finish. This is not a coating but the surface of the pen. I *can* write with it unposted, but it feels even better posted, and the cap has a plastic liner. Nonetheless, I am very hesitant about this, as constant posting and unposting might very well start to smooth the barrel of the pen, causing visual damage that would harm the visual beauty that presents itself at the moment. It is not the end of the world, it is not something that will cause me to not use the pen, but it is something I need to take into consideration.

 

Isn't it silly, though? Something as simple as whether to put the cap of the pen on the back end can cause us all this typing?