Conklin Mark Twain Crescent Filler - Need A New Feed

[BamaPen]

A pen friend and I both have early versions of the Conklin Mark Twain Crescent Filler fountain pens. Mine writes quite nicely and has no problems, but his, which he bought recently, simply will not deliver ink to the nib. If I give the sac a gentle squeeze, ink dribbles out at the junction of the feed and the face of the section, but none makes its way on down the feed.

 

Since we have two essentially identical pens, we've been able to swap parts until we have isolated the problem to the feed itself.

 

We have cleaned the non-functional feed in my ultrasonic cleaner, run a one thousandth thick nib flosser down the channels in the feed, and generally done everything we can think of, but no ink will flow to the nib.

 

A search online produced a FPN thread from a while back that said the early Conklin Mark Twain Crescents suffered from "iffy" feeds, but that the current Conklin company does not have spare parts for the earlier pens.

 

All that said, does anyone know of a source for a feed that should work in this pen?

[BamaPen]

Problem solved!

 

I contacted YAFA with the problem and they promptly send me a new feed, which fixed the problem. Apparently the pen in question is not one of the very early Conklin Mark Twain Crescents, but is in fact somewhat later, and uses the current feed.

 

Interesting, though...I have examined the "bad" feed and the good one with a loupe and can't detect any difference between the two.