Search the Community

Hi Gang, Just a quick note to rave on about the Parker 51 aerometric that I recently acquired, and to pose a question. As you’ll see in the picture below its stunning and as close to NOS as I've been able to find. I've long wanted an English made, Navy Grey P51 with a broad nib as it's just like the one my father bought some time back in the 50's. As a 10 year old in the mid 70's I found my father’s Parker 51 and tried to fix it for him. I'm not entirely sure what had happened to his pen up until that point, but my memory was that it wasn't filling properly and the nib was all over the place. With a 10 year's patience and skill level my repair went as could be expected and the pen disappeared into the mists of time. Fast forward to last week and I've picked up the pen pictured above. I ran with the, "You've Got Your First Found In The Wild Parker 51 In Your Hand, Now What?", playbook and then inked it. It was smooth as silk, but drier than it should be. After a few days of flushing and ultrasonic cleaning it wasn't getting any better and so it was time to look under the hood. I expected it to have some caked in Superchrome or P51 ink that needed to be sorted out. Amazingly, it was crystal clear, the only issue was that the feed & nib weren’t correctly aligned with the collector. A quick check of “Da Book” indicated that the wide channel should be directly above the nib, but it was actually rotated about 70 degrees. I reassembled it, inked it; perfection! I was originally looking for a P51 to use as a daily writer. My problem is that as this pen really is near new old stock, complete with chalk marks and a perfect period correct box, I’m really starting to think that I should preserve it rather than use it. That said, pens are to be used, and a pen as glorious as this deserves to be written with every day. So there it is. What would you do?