Annealing A Vintage 14K Nib

[ninobrn99]

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the process that went into making nibs back in the day of the flex pens. There had to a be a process that would determine which 14k nib would have a certain amount of flex and which would be rigid.

 

I have inspected a few nibs that looked exactly the same to the naked eye, but performed very different. Is anyone currently or has anyone experimented with adding flexibility to a nib through the annealing (softening) process? I know the idea of flex is to not based solely on the thinness of the tines, but I'm sure the shoulders and breather hole have a role in it.

 

I guess what i'm getting at is: has anyone tried different techniques to make a nib more flexible by either softening or thinning and without cutting the nib up. Before I start trying to figure it out, I'm looking for some guidance or lessons learned.

 

I limited it to vintage nibs because I know modern 14k nibs are generally stamped and not made like they used to be. Before I make friends with one of the many jewelers in the area, I wanted to reach out to those familiar with nibs and their dynamics before I jump into the general process and then trying to apply it after the fact. I guess I'd like a fish and along the way, I'll learn to do it myself too.

 

Nino

[wimg]

Hi Nino,

 

Considering the shape of a nib once the nib forming process is complete, I personally think that it is impossible to change the alloy characteristics without deforming the nib completely - that is what we are talking about.

 

Apart from a variety of metals added to the gold to enhance flexibility, where it seems that 14K gold is optimum although there was a 9K Montblanc nib not long after the 2nd World War which was probably the best flex nib ever, it needs to be treated in a very specific way to make if flexible. The one big difference is that it is rolled in only one direction, rather than in all directions which is more common to give it the same strength in all directions.

 

IOW, a gold sheet needs to be heated, and rolled in one direction, heated again, and rolled in the same direction, etc., until the right characteristics for a flex nib are achieved - crystallization in one direction. This direction must line up with the nibs (and slit obviously).

 

Also, the nib must be tempered, as it has to be as hard as possible, not soft, in order to give it the strength required to jump back to the "normal" position after flexing, without losing its form. A softened nib will loose its form very rapidly, and will not jump back to its original position.

 

So, rather than softening, you should harden it. Heat it to 650 degrees centigrade for at least 10 minutes, and cool it quickly in cold water, to do so. I can't tell you if this needs repeating, however.

 

So, for a modern nib to be made into a flex nib, what you can do is

- extend the slit

- add an extra "breather" hole at the end of the slit to give the nib more freedom to flex at that point

- make the nib narrower

- make the wings of the nib smaller, if it has any; just retain what is required to keep the nib positioned properly on the feed; wings do keep it from flexing

- thin the nib at the optimum flex point, in a gradual fashion, i.e, at the end of the slit

- temper/harden the nib, as indicated above

 

The gold of most modern nibs has been tempered, however. Maybe doing it a few more times makes it more pronounced - I wouldn't know, I am not a metallurgist. However, make sure the tipping is not soldered on, but welded on. At the temperatures required for tempering you may otherwise loose the tipping.

 

HTH, warm regards, Wim

 

P.S.:

You may well need to improve flow characteristics of the feed as well. The easiest way is to deepen the ink channel with a sharp, thin hobby knife - just be careful, as it is also easy to destroy the feed by using too much force.

 

In addition, you may have to add an overfeed if the nib flexes well enough too move the tines too far off the feed. You can make a simple overfeed from a thin piece of plastic film (transparency film f.e.), by cutting it in an appropriate shape, and inserting that between section and nib so that it always rests on top of the nib, whatever you do. You may have to carefully file away a tiny bit from the section, or collar holding nib and feed together, to be able to insert it back into the pen, together with nib and feed. it should be a tight fit.

Edited March 13, 2016 by wimg
Added PS

[ninobrn99]

Wim,

 

Thank you so much for the response! Once it all sinks in, I'm sure it will help out quite a bit! hahaha. From what I've been researching, I figured I would need to heat and cool. I guess it's going to take some practice to get it right. I really want to figure this out not just for myself, but so I can hopefully offer that to a wider group of folks wanting the same.

 

Nino

[wimg]

Hi Nino,

 

It is only a pleasure .

 

I have been researching the same, and have been speaking with a few experts .

I know there is someone out there who acquired a nib manufacturing machine from the1950s, who is planning to make it work again . We'll have to wait and see .

Warm regards, Wim

[jgrasty]

Annealing at 650C for 30 minutes and quenching, softens a typical 14k gold alloy to its softest state. Every time a gold alloy is annealed, it is returned to its softest state. Rolling hardens the alloy by a process called work hardening. A sheet of gold alloy can only be rolled two or three times before annealing is required, otherwise, work hardening prevents further rolling without damaging the sheet. This is why gold sheets are annealed numerous times during rolling from an ingot to a very thin sheet of gold.

 

A gold nib in an annealed state is likely to deform. A gold alloy is hardened from this annealed state by either heat treating or work hardening. Heat treating is complex subject, but the short version is the alloy is heated to temperature less than the annealing temperature for a prescribed period of time to harden it and allowed to cool slowly, details of which are dependent on the precise alloy contents. Work hardening can be done by rolling, forming (in a die) or forging (hitting with a hammer or die). I am unaware of any nib manufacturers heat treating nibs, but all of them work harden nibs by rolling and forming. A very limited number may forge nibs, but that is a costly process and not common.

 

There are some good details on 14k gold alloys and their properties, both annealed and hardened, in this paper The Metallurgy of Some Carat Gold Jewellery Alloys. 14k gold alloys used for fountain pen nibs have roughly equal parts copper and silver with a little added zinc to improve casting.

 

 

[AltecGreen]

A very limited number may forge nibs, but that is a costly process and not common.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forging was how the vintage nibs were made hence the flexibility. Just to be more technical, annealed metals are soft. It is the defects in the material that give rise to strength. The dislocations in the lattice present a barrier to plastic flow of the material. Too many defects and the material becomes hard and brittle. Annealing removes defects. The composition of the alloy matters as it affects the degree of work hardening. The recipes for how the vintage nibs exist (in the hands of collectors in the form of company documents). No one really wants to pay the cost to replicate the old processes.

[Drone]

I have heard a vintage technique to yield a flexible yet resilient gold alloy nib involved layering rolled sheets then hammering and annealing. Perhaps the process is similar to that used in the making of Damascus steel. Repeatedly folding a gold alloy sheet rapidly builds up the number of layers (N folds yields 2^N layers).

[wimg]

 

 

Forging was how the vintage nibs were made hence the flexibility. Just to be more technical, annealed metals are soft. It is the defects in the material that give rise to strength. The dislocations in the lattice present a barrier to plastic flow of the material. Too many defects and the material becomes hard and brittle. Annealing removes defects. The composition of the alloy matters as it affects the degree of work hardening. The recipes for how the vintage nibs exist (in the hands of collectors in the form of company documents). No one really wants to pay the cost to replicate the old processes.

 

Hi AltecGreen,

 

I thought nibs were stamped from rolled gold sheets, they certainly were in the 1950s. The process was not automated, however, short of stamping a bunch of nibs from a single, standardized (size wise), sheet of gold.

 

When were they being forged?

The gold was rolled when still hot, manually, I know so much (saw some pictures). Or is that what you meant by forging?

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Warm regards, Wim

[jgrasty]

For those interested in the subject of gold metallurgy, the best treatise I've found is chapter 7 in the book Gold: Science and Applications. Gold alloys harden differently than steel, thus I don't believe there is a method like Damascus steel for gold. That chapter goes through all of the known hardening methods for gold in detail.

 

In my opinion, the vintage nib makers didn't have a magic formula for flexible nibs. I think they just got lucky sometimes. I assayed a number of vintage and modern nibs, and the alloy contents were all very similar. As evidence, review the listings of similar nibs; there is enormous variation in the flexibility of the nibs (stiff, semi-flex, very flexible, wet noodle, etc.). If the vintage nib makers had a consistent process, then they would have produced nibs with consistent flexibility, and they didn't.

 

Modern nib makers still have very poor alloy process control. In the case of vintage nib makers, they didn't have modern vacuum melting and casting equipment, and they didn't have sophisticated control of the alloy contents of their gold. In the case of modern nib makers, all the videos I've seen of their processes indicate they still cast in air, not a vacuum. This allows oxides to form in the alloy, reducing the potential hardness of the alloys needed for a flexible nib. Secondly, they reuse scrap gold, which prevents having a consistent alloy, and reintroduces oxides back into the alloy. Thirdly, consistent hardness would require heat treating (tempering) in inert atmosphere ovens. If you're making a stiff nib, none of this matters, but for a flexible nib in gold, every detail matters.

 

Finally, it is certainly possible to design an alloy, probably via microalloying, and a rolling, forming and heat treat process to create a consistent, flexible nib. As far as I know, no one has done this, and that nib would be at a considerable cost disadvantage to currently available nibs manufactured under essentially the same process as those made by vintage nib makers.

[Bo Bo Olson]

Some great posts.

I don't know much, but Thomas (Kaweco) told me things about Kaweco, which had been from 1900 up to 1930 the best pen in Germany.

 

Kaweco went bankrupt in 1930, not due to the pen company but the owner and the Crash of 29.

 

Kaweco, before 1914, Kaweco imported it's nibs...the best in the world** from the Morton Company in the US. 1914 Kaweco made a deal to buy Morton machines and in April, imported American workers to Germany to teach how to do it. Then came August.

Up to 1930 Kaweco made the best nibs in Germany and no nib made (outside of Morton) by anyone was better or as good.

 

They had tiny little anvils, heated the nib on a Bunsen burner; last step hand forging; annealing it and so on.

To keep the iridium form burning off, the tip was stuck in a potato.

So I guess the canteen served potato soup every day.

 

When the company was brought up from bankruptcy, the first thing the new owner did was save money and make a nib no better than Soennecken and MB....second class. No more potato soup in the canteen.

Kaweco had made the best pen in Germany before 1930....best nib=best pen.

 

** Osmia used Osmium, instead of 'iridium' compounds from 1922...so with the tipping, there could be some dispute. Not though the rest of the nib.

[Precise]

Annealed metals take a permanent set at low flex. Don't do it.

 

A surprising fact is that in the range of flex below the point of permanent set, annealed metals do not flex any easier. The only thing annealing does is to lower the threshold at which it takes a permanent set. It's nonintuitive, but true.

 

Alan

[MarkTrain]

For a look how nibs were made in days gone by:

 

LINK

[jgrasty]

For a look how nibs were made in days gone by:

 

LINK

 

That's a lovely video, thanks for sharing. That's the same method of nib manufacture used in the days of vintage flex, except for the resistance welding process of the "iridium" tip. Vintage nib makers before the 1940s used a chunk of naturally occurring iridium alloy that was welded to the tip with a flame.

[Christopher Godfrey]

I bet jgrasty is right, you know: make lots (and lots) of nibs, then simply grade them as to their flexibility. Making individual batches would have been very labour-intensive. For that matter, I still cannot understand why anyone would <want> to go into the business of making flexy nibs today -- the <thinning> of a nib (a Bo Bo "nail") is, in comparison, so straight-forward! There are many nib specialists around who will gladly do it for us for a small fee -- and even cut away the shoulders of an existing nib.

 

There are many of us who are "interested" in how it was all done; but why go to this (expensive) bother?

 

I am puzzled...(anyone else?)

[Christopher Godfrey]

On re-reading nino's original post, perhaps I have gone overboard in my own post? It looks to me, now, as though he has no interest in going into the business of nibs...

 

Forgive me if I sounded too fierce and had jumped to conclusions?

[ninobrn99]

Thank you all for the wealth of knowledge! I did not intend to go into the business of nib making to try an mimic those of olden days. My intent was to see how viable an option it was to add flex to my older 14k nibs. I didn't want to resort to introducing cutouts.

 

I imagine that the idea is to thin the metal from around the breather hole towards the base of the nib. I didn't know if I needed to soften the metal before I decided to do that or if I just go right into flattening it out or shaving away some.

 

Nino

[wimg]

Thank you all for the wealth of knowledge! I did not intend to go into the business of nib making to try an mimic those of olden days. My intent was to see how viable an option it was to add flex to my older 14k nibs. I didn't want to resort to introducing cutouts.

 

I imagine that the idea is to thin the metal from around the breather hole towards the base of the nib. I didn't know if I needed to soften the metal before I decided to do that or if I just go right into flattening it out or shaving away some.

 

Nino

 

No softening, IOW . If anything, hardening .

 

Warm regards, Wim

[corgicoupe]

I think it is important to understand that work hardening and annealing of a gold alloy primarily affects the yield strength---the stress at which it will plastically deform and take a permanent set. These two processes have minimal effect on the elastic modulus. The flex of a nib is primarily determined by elastic modulus and nib geometry. The main geometry factors are time thickness and the curvature of the nib around the feed. The elastic modulus is a function of the interatomic forces, which are not strongly affected by either work hardening or annealing.

[Christopher Godfrey]

Nino, the nib specialists that I know will work on adding flexibility by gently grinding away material from under the tines, as you so rightly surmise. However, go too far and you will ruin your nib! (It goes without saying)

 

If you wish to <play> with flex, then why not buy one or two cheap Noodler's pens and do what I did: take a Dremel to the nib and cut away the shoulders, resembling a (Pilot) Falcon nib? I have made a rather-flexible nib that way; but do I <use> it? Not really: too many wonderful vintage Pelikans to bother with it; but it was a good exercise and <easy>.

[ninobrn99]

I planned on trying it on a few different types of nibs in order to try and understand it a bit better. I'm fortunate that there are so many jewelers out here where I live and I'm sure that one of them would be helpful in talking or showing me a few things. I did plan on shaving away and also doing something similar to what the Pilot FA nib or Nakaya soft elastics have behind shoulders.

 

Nino