Need Help With Dating This Parker Vacumatic

[sexauerw]

I just found this Vacumatic at an antique mall. It's kind of rough cosmetically but it fills and writes quite well. The date code on the barrel is quite clear, just the numeral 4 with no dots. Can someone help me with the actual date?

 

[Parker51]

First Quarter 1944.

[FarmBoy]

Believe Parker removed dots as the year progressed making no-dots 4th quarter.

[inkstainedruth]

I concur with what FarmBoy said. My understanding is that it was easier to remove dots for the imprint stamp than to add them later (I'm guessing that they were filed off the plate used to do the imprint).

With earlier generations of Vacs (Lockdown and Speedline filler models) there are often two numbers, and in that case IIRC the first number will be the production quarter. There is apparently some overlap when Parker switched over to the dot-code system, but since that's clearly a 3rd Generation model pen (with the plastic plunger) it will be a single number with some configuration of dates to denote the quarter.

You can read more about it in the article about Vacumatics on Tony Fischier's site: www. parker collector com. I'm hoping that at some point he is able to to update the Vac ID file a little better at some point, but from the pix it looks as if you might have a Major (without knowing the size I can't tell for certain, but it looks like the style of cap band for that size).

Nice find. Azure Blue is my favorite color for Vacs, followed by Red Shadow Wave.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth