Anatomy Of A Esterbrook Button Filler

[northlodge]

I intended only to pop this in the "English pens" area, but thought it might also be of interest here.

 

The Esterbrook Relief 2S is quiet a rare beast even this side of the Atlantic, and thus I have never been called upon to repair this internal filling system before. Picture 1, shows the dissassembled pen, with the rather unusual pressure bar system the focus of picture 2 (This was in pieces when I accessed the pen, and thus not working).

 

For completion, Pic 3 & 4 show the finished item.

 

1

 

 

2

 

 

3.

 

4

 

[Ron Z]

Interesting picture. What lengths pen manufacturers would go to, to avoid having to pay a patent royalty....

[gweimer1]

Interesting picture. What lengths pen manufacturers would go to, to avoid having to pay a patent royalty....

 

What I do in my day job is high-volume imaging systems. One company also happens to own the core scanner drivers. Their competition has spent nearly 20 years building components to get around paying those same sort of license fees.

 

Yeah, companies will walk the ends of the earth to avoid paying a competitor a single farthing.

[gweimer1]

So, to the pen itself...

 

How does this work? It looks like an odd variant of the Parker Duofold with the hanging pressure bar. Does that threaded holder mount from the inside, and get held by a nut of some sort?

[northlodge]

So, to the pen itself...

 

How does this work? It looks like an odd variant of the Parker Duofold with the hanging pressure bar. Does that threaded holder mount from the inside, and get held by a nut of some sort?

 

My immediate thought was also the Parker hanging bar.

 

The operational bar is held in place firmly by two bent lugs, so cannot be removed with the ease of the Parker system.

The threaded holder screws into the base of the barrel, there is nothing required to be attached from the otherside to keep it in place.

 

I used the screwdriver with the homemake U shaped end that I would normally use for secfuring the nut when fitting a Conway clip stud (I hope that makes sense). This was awkward, but allowed the holder to be screwed / unscrewed without further damaging the central hanging bar.

 

The whole works very effectively, but it does seem to be a fine case of over engineering.

[AAAndrew]

So, who made these pens? I was under the impression that Esterbrook only made the nibs and someone else made the pens, at least for the English Relief pens.

 

In the trove of late Esterbrook stuff I recently found it's mentioned several times that Esterbrook didn't actually make any fountain pens themselves until 1931.

[northlodge]

So, who made these pens?

 

 

This would have been made by Conway Stewart, I have also seen a small number of CS pens that used this same button filling system, however I had never needed to dismantle one before.