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Recently I won a lot in eBay that included a black A.W. Faber-Castell “Value Fountain Pen” (Wertfüllhalter). Lambrou’s book has this as model 36/56 produced in 1936, around the time when Faber-Castell was buying into Osmia. These are not easy to find and mine came with a manifold D nib, which I understand are even less common. The pen works on the same principle as the Vacumatic. There is a short rubber sack attached to the end of an inner chamber and when this sack is compressed (by a short pressure bar attached to a button) and let to expand, it draws ink via a long breather tube attached to the feed. I could not find any diagrams of how this pen looks like inside or how it is disassembled. Old posts in penexchange.de mention that is a difficult pen to repair. Thanks to an old brouchure I could find in Paolo’s Pen Post, I had a vague idea that there should be an inner chamber to which the rubber sack was attached and that this most likely was attached to or part of the section. So, without much information but just intuition and patience, I tried to see if I could get this apart. The easiest thing to disassemble was the rear. The blind cap is made of hard rubber (as is the top of the cap above the clip) and this removes to reveal an enamelled button attached to a black painted aluminium screw base. The button pulls easily, together with the pressure bar which is bent outwards (more on this later). A Vacumatic pump extraction tool would fit the aluminium screw assembly (but just about) and this also comes off easily to reveal the rubber sac. When you pull the remnants of this you can see the upper end of the inner ink chamber, and what appears to be a circular channel cut inside the barrel. At first I thought the sac would fit into this channel, but that was not the case. The front end is where the complication of repairing this pen lies. The nib / feed is mounted on a collar that screws into the section, very much like the MB or Pelikan design. There are some holes for a tool, but none of the ones I had worked and in the end, it required a lot of soaking (about a week) for the nib assembly to come off. I was hoping that the inner chamber was attached to the feed, but that is not the case. One has to remove the section to get to that. The section is also made of hard rubber and is clearly a separate part from the rest of the barrel, which is made from celluloid. Unlike Pelikan’s design of a unibody barrel / section, this should come off. The problem is that it wouldn’t! After much soaking I got the section to move, but it was not screwed, and all it did was rotate around the barrel end. No amount of pulling force would make it move out even a millimetre. I assumed for a while this operated in the same manner as the Pelikan pistons for the 400 series, which have to be knocked from inside the barrel after soaking and heating. I tried to hammer it out from inside and while it moved out ever so slightly, the moment I tried to grab it from the section it went back to its original position! As a last resort, I tried to heat the barrel as much as it could take, bearing in mind this was celluloid, and using a spark plug removal tool I pulled with force from the section grip and after a couple of tries, the part finally came off! It turns out the inner chamber has some ridges which were filled with shellac or other type of cement and were grabbing the barrel. Once this came out, the pen was now fully disassembled! These are all the parts, ready for ultrasonic cleaning: From there, repairing the pen was largely uneventful. I used a size 20 rubber sack and measured it against the old one to make sure it was not coming against the button screw assembly which, as you can see from the picture above, is essentially a cap with a small opening just to allow the pressure bar to come through. This seems like a good design, as the cap prevents the button being pressed too much, potentially breaking the mechanism. After measuring twice to be sure and ensuring the sac was cut clean, I just glued it with shellac to the lip of the inner chamber. Once dried and powdered with talcum, I screwed the nib/feed assembly back into the section and reinserted the whole thing into the barrel. It required generous heating of the barrel on the way back, as the inner chamber is really a tight fit. I did not deem necessary to add any shellac to this. The ridges outside the inner chamber create enough friction for the section not to move at all once the plastic hardens in place. So far it has not moved at all. At the other end of the barrel, the aluminium blind cap screw could be inserted back by hand without much problem. The final step was re-inserting the pressure bar-button assembly. The pressure bar bends outwards, towards the barrel’s walls, and the sharp end comes to rest into a ridge which is cut from inside the barrel, about half-way through. This coincides with the end of the inner ink chamber. Therefore, when the button is actioned, there is no pressure on the inner chamber but actually on the barrel wall. This way the section is unperturbed and would not come out of place accidentally by pushing the button. That’s also why I thought it was unnecessary to shellac it into place. Despite the name “value” implying the pen was inexpensive (these were sold for 15RM, or about 100€ in today’s money), the pen feels well designed and quality made. The thickness of the celluloid barrel is very generous, and the rubber section quite sturdy, surviving unscathed my various attempts to wiggle it out of place. What I don’t understand is why Faber-Castell did not go for a screw-in section. The pressure-fit design with the ridges works well but is a bit nerve-wrecking to disassemble, and one has to be careful to either leave the feed and nib in place when removing it, or inserting a pencil in its place to avoid breaking the hard rubber grip. The most interesting part was the feed / nib assembly. The breather tube had a moveable piece of hard rubber with a channel going through it, like a sort of inner feed that stops against a narrower section of the inner chamber. I am not quite sure why this was needed and in subsequent pictures I have found of other similar pens, this part appears to be missing. I am not sure what would be the impact of not having it. When inserting this back, I placed it carefully on top of the feed, aligning the channels to ensure capillarity works its magic, and so far I have not found any flow issues with it Here is how the pen looks fully restored, with a writing sample. As expected, the nib is stiff but smooth and yields a very generous flow, even with dry ink (I was using Pelikan 4001 Violet).