How Many Times Can You Remove A Friction Fit Feed?

[Jonny_J]

Hey guys, long-time lurker, first-time poster. First, a little background on me. (If you're not interested in this part, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph containing the question). My interest in fountain pens is mainly artistic. I began cartooning using dip pens and brushes, which I still do feel are more expressive, but in the interest of speed, have begun inking with the tools from my sketch kit: a Pentel pocket bruch pen with Platinum converter, and a fountain pen that a friend of my father's made for me on his lathe for my 21st birthday, both loaded with Winsor-Newton Calligraphy Ink (the water-soluble one with the blue cap). Have had good luck with this set-up for a couple of years now. I have adjusted the nib of the pen and deepened the feed channel with a pin for better flow, because I have a somewhat frenetic style and I draw fast. I also like to sketch with a Pilot Parallel loaded with Higgins Sepia Calligraphy Ink for a 19th century look.

 

Anyway, the question: the kit pen my father's friend made has a friction-fit feed, which can be pulled out by finger-force alone. I try not to take it apart more than necessary, but I use this thing *A LOT*. Do friction-fit parts eventually wear out? Is there a limit to how many times I can do this before I will have to replace the section, or the feed, or both?

 

Side note: my mom's husband gave me an old Cross that the ink converter was so loose, it would just fall off, and I saved it by brushing on a coat of clear nail polish to reduce the inner diameter of the neck of the converter. Can the same fix be applied to sections that have become loose and sloppy?

Edited March 9, 2014 by Jonny_J

[Hooker56]

Welcome Jonny_J! Short answer Yes, but use shellac. Coat the section collar and wait about two hours till good and dry before refitting the section. If more is needed recoat and try again. Shellac is easier to remove if you make a mistake and won't hurt the plastic.

 

Also, have you considered a Noodlers Ahab or two? you can find them on the web for about $20 each. They hold a ton of ink, and are pretty flexy nibs. You can have several pens for different colored inks w/o having to clean and flush so often.

 

Good luck,

 

Clayton

[Jonny_J]

Thanks for the advice, Clayton. I considered a flexy nib, but over time, the need for it went away. A few years ago I didn't have good brush control, so I only used a brush for the fattest lines. But then I took a Chinese Sumi-e class, and started carrying a brush-pen in my sketch kit, and now my brush control is good enough that I use it for most of the drawing (i.e. anywhere I want line thickness variation). I still use a pen, though, because I don't have enough fine motor control to do fine lines, tiny details, or cross-hatching with a brush, the way, say, Jeff Smith does. Also, there are things a brush can't do, such as zigzags, scribbles, and curlicues. But I have stopped reaming the hell out of dip nibs to coax line weight variation out of them. When I *WAS* doing that, my heavy-handed style destroyed dip nibs fairly quickly. Not such a tragedy when the nib costs 30 cents and is disposable to begin with, but flexi fountain pen nibs would have become an expensive habit. But anyway, as I said, the need to commit such atrocities was solved by practicing more with a brush. Side note: I still think a dip nib has a texture that can't be imitated by anything else (see Ralph Steadman), but for a web comic that's been reduced to screen resolution (70 dpi), nobody can tell the difference anyway, so I opt for the faster, more convenient tools.

[learningsquare]

You have to worry about some pens more than others, but anything that originally relied on friction fitting will probably eventually wear out given enough pulling. I generally don't try to mess with my more expensive pens, but I can say from experience that Lamy Safari/Al-Star feeds will loosen up significantly after a few pulls, as will Parker Sonnet feeds. They've never gotten close to the point at which I thought they were going to fall out, but nonetheless they're noticeably looser than they were initially. (A side note: on the other hand, if you slip Lamy nib units on and off with any regularity, they will start to become very loose, to the point that they occasionally shift while writing.)

 

You know, sometimes I think we clean pens too often. I'm always OCD when it comes to heavily saturated inks, but with lower-maintenance inks, you should always be conscious of the fact that fully taking apart friction-fit parts and doing a deep clean after each and every fill may put more wear on your pens than the cleaning helps.

[Inkling13]

It's a kit pen. Sure. Replacement parts are easier to come by, but I wouldn't make a habit. Most "fountain pen safe" inks should be able to be flushed out without any troubles. The only time I would pull out the nib is to clean up insoluble crud, after it's gone through a US cleaner without any improvement. The thing is, yes parts wear out, but also, such drastic actions are rarely needed to be done unless you are abusing your pens.

Most, if not all my pens can be disassembled like this, but I can say that each pen has only been disassembled 2-3 times in all the years I have owned them. My biggest fear is not that the feed and other parts wear out, but rather, I am afraid of snapping the feed, since the effective cross section of many feeds are quite thin, only looking thick from the fins. Once that snaps, you are SOOL.

[Jonny_J]

@Inkling: I'll bear that in mind. The last time I took it apart was when I finally got sick of the dry flow and decided to modify the feed. It's a lot easier to remove material than it is to put it back, so I kept putting it back together to check where I was at, then taking it apart again to deepen the feed channel a little more. Now that it's together again, I'll try to avoid taking it apart needlessly. I do flush it periodically, so hopefully that will increase the mean time between disassembly sessions.