When in the 50s were these ballpoints made and how do I fix them?

[Brian-McQueen]

I have figured it out.  Of course, I had this manual page for a while, but feared mangling the brass fingers by attempting this method.  However, I just tried it with 3 pens and succeeded.  There are a couple of caveats to this repair method that I will outline below:

 

1: You need a wooden dowel rod to use as your punch so you don't damage the plastic button. 

2: The mechanism MUST be in a "clicked" position before attempting to punch it out.  If it is not in the down, clicked position, you will bend the brass fingers on the mechanism.  It doesn't have to be fully engaged in the click position, but you have to start with the button pressed down. 

3: There has to be a reasonable amount of the old ballpoint sludge cleaned out, otherwise the mechanism might catch on the goop and bind up. 

4: There's no guarantee that your mechanism will come out in one piece.  If you are careful and the cap is decently clean before starting, you have a good chance of it coming out.  Sheaffer assumed that anyone removing the old mechanism had a new replacement mechanism to put in the pen, so they were not very concerned with damaging it upon removal. 

5: Go slowly.  You don't want to force anything too hard, in case something is stuck.  You might have to punch it down a little, drop some naphtha in there, try to clean it out a little bit, and then try punching again.

 

You just put the ballpoint cap on a wooden surface, and punch out the mechanism with the wooden dowel rod and a hammer.

 

To replace it, you just push it back in with the same wooden dowel you used to remove it.  The mechanism has to be in the "retracted" position when you re-insert it, otherwise you will bend the fingers.  The retracted position is where the fingers of the mechanism are all the way forward against the "disk" at the front of the mechanism.  You want the pressure to be on the brass disk at the very front, not on the knurled collar, as the repair manual might suggest (it is unclear).  See the photo below from an original Sheaffer Repair Manual.

[joss]

Great! Thanks for sharing the repair manual page and your experience.

Do you need to push the dowel beyond the opening in the cap top to release the clicker mechanism? If not, an alternative for hammer tapping the dowel may be to use a mini vise of this type (they can be found less expensive). It allows applying a well controlled, gradual and steady tension on the button of the clicker, while applying the naptha at the open side of the cap.

[Brian-McQueen]

4 hours ago, joss said:

Great! Thanks for sharing the repair manual page and your experience.

Do you need to push the dowel beyond the opening in the cap top to release the clicker mechanism? If not, an alternative for hammer tapping the dowel may be to use a mini vise of this type (they can be found less expensive). It allows applying a well controlled, gradual and steady tension on the button of the clicker, while applying the naptha at the open side of the cap.

The dowel does have to go beyond the click button opening, but only by 1/8" or so in order to dislodge the mechanism.  In my experience, not much force is needed at all, just gentle taps. I only had to use a little hand pressure to remove one of them.  The mini vise would probably work quite well, if you could devise a pushrod with a stable base and a dished recess that would stay engaged with the dome of the button.  But I just used a chopstick and a hammer, and it worked beautifully.