I am starting a monthly column on writing instrument repairs and restorations. The terms repair and restoration have different connotations, although there is a significant overlap between the two terms. Using the analogy of a car, when a recent model car going back to about twenty-five years is take into a shop for say engine work, that is a repair job.

Most car manufacturers maintain a parts inventory for ten to fifteen years and then many of the original equipment manufactures (OEM) continue to make and sell parts for another ten years or so. Cars that are twenty-five to forty years old fall into a gray area where original parts may not be available. Somewhere in this timeframe, restoration process begins to take place. Frequently, third party manufacturers begin to make copies of the original parts. Parts can be salvaged from existing cars and refurbished. Or it is possible to start from scratch and make the necessary parts. Whenever OEM parts become scarce or no longer available, then a car undergoes some level of restoration.

Of course there are folks who want their fifty-year-old car to run and the heck with everything else and these repairs are like any other repair job. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who want their fifty-year-old car to look the way it did when it rolled out of the showroom. Such a total restoration can take months and maybe even years of work. I tend to follow this kind of breakdown for pens: Repairs on modern pens and restoration on vintage ones.

Each month I plan to highlight the work that I am doing on some writing instrument. Most of them will be about fountain pens, although a few pencils or ballpoints may crop up once in a while. I will write a description of the repair process and I will include photos of the parts being work on. I do not intend this to be a "how-to" column, like how to change a sac. Although if a particularly interesting filling system shows up and requires some work done on it, it may be important to show how the sac fits on this pen. As interesting jobs show up, I will document the work, take some photos and present it in this column.

In this first column I planned a visual tour of my work areas and a look at some of the tools and equipment I use in my work. I spent about twenty-five years in the hobby of restoring cars: mostly BMWs and Porsches, although a few other marques were in the mix. A little more than ten years ago I got tired of lying flat on my back on a cold cement floor with oil running down my face and started to work more seriously on pens.

I have always used fountain pens and tinkered with them to produce better performance. I thought that pens should be relatively simple implements to work on as compared to the thousands of parts in a car. It did not turn out that way, ever since my first attempt to restore a filler on a Sheaffer Vac-Fil. There was no around to tell me that this was not a pen for a novice to get started on.

Working on fountain pens is a blending of skills and talents that combine fine metal work and fine woodwork. Hard rubber, celluloid and later plastics are more akin to hardwood than to metal. While nibs, clips and levers require a different kind of skill. Fortunately for me some of this kind of blending work is necessary in vintage car restorations and I was able to make a smooth transition between them.

During my early work on pens, I thought I would accomplish everything I needed to know about pens restoration in a few months. To the contrary, the more deeply I delved into the intricacies of pen restoration, the more I became engaged in each project. Now thirteen years late, time sure flies when you are having fun, I am totally engroused in learning more about this craft. There are still so many more pens to work on, so many problems to unravel and so much more to learn.

In my office, I work on pens at my drop leaf desk. Not very different from any other desk except for the strip of magnetic holder where my tools are attached. The dozen or so tools there, plus a few more lying on the desk are the ones I use in 60-70% of all the work I do on pens. The section pliers, the vac tool and the nib block are on the tools bench that holds my heat gun, because that is where they are the most useful. For the novice and intermediate repairer, these tools are sufficient for most jobs that they are likely to encounter. The four-drawer pen cabinet on my desk contains the twenty or so pens that I use on my daily rotation. I made that cabinet from wood that was salvaged from the Seattle waterfront about a century ago.

I have a ton of other tools for the remaining jobs that come along. I had the good fortune to inherit three complete workshops in addition to the many tools I purchased for my car work. I have so many hand tools that I frequently forget if I own a particular one. I probably have twenty hammers of various weights, sizes and shapes; sixty or more pliers; multiple examples of every sized drill bit in creation. You can see some examples of these on my tool bench.

There is a flex shaft, a heat gun, a Dremel in a drill press, some dozen or so pliers, a variety of screwdrivers and probes, files of various kind and a drill bit holder. The drills in this holder are not used for drilling, because I hammer on the cutting point of the bit, and they serve as a drift for pushing out pen parts.

The parts cabinet on the right holds European piston parts, mostly for MBs and Pelikans. The top wide drawer holds a variety of steel blocks, jewelers saw, barrel light, hand vice and other tools. The top drawer on the right contains some twenty pliers, followed by the next drawer down that hold adhesives. The bottom one contains duplicate samples of adhesives, in case I run out in the drawer above, as well as other miscellaneous supplies.

To the right of the tool bench are my pen cabinets. These contain some 400 pens that serve as my pen references. If I need to find out about the design of a particular pen, this is where I look. My other sources of information can be found in pen books and reference binders and these take up two shelves on my bookshelf next to my computer. Despite all these pens, I do not consider myself as a very serious collector of pens. I do have a hundred so pens that I treasure in another pen chest.

Below those cabinets with reference pens are shelves that contain boxes of reference hard rubber pens. My plating equipment can also be found here as well. In front of those shelves are ultrasonic cleaner and next to it is a heater for application on larger surface areas. To the left of the pen reference chests is another shelf with a bunch of desk pens and holders at the top. Below those are various kinds of ink, more parts cabinets, references books, and boxes for pencils, leads and ballpoints. As you can see, in my office, a twelve foot long back wall is dedicated to tools, parts and equipment for pen repair and restoration.

Down in the basement is where I keep power equipment used for pens that are too large to fit in my office. Located here are a Sherline lath and a bench polisher sitting in an air filtration cabinet. Behind the wall where the lath is located is a workshop for woodwork and car work. Behind the wall of the bench polisher is the garage that contains more power equipment such as a table saw, compressor, a bunch of other equipment and space for two cars. I have often wondered if I like tools and equipment more than I like pens. I believe that it is wrong-headed to think of this as an either/or situation, but one of complimentarity.

My professional life is spent as a historian of early twentieth century science and technology. As part of my work, I managed to accumulate some many thousand books. I have never give much thought as to whether these books are in paperback, hard back, first edition or some special publication. They serve to provide information and for the way in which an author develops an idea or a concept. My approach to fountain pens and other writing instruments is very similar. For me, these instruments are the single most important tools to expand and transform the transmission of permanent human communications.

Some may argue that such a designation belongs to the printing press, although I suspect arguments of this kind are similar to ones about the chicken and the egg. I value and treasure pens above all other tools, because without them my entire world would be greatly diminished. Consequently my passion and obsession is to maintain, repair and restore these wonderful implements so that they can continue to function as they were intended to do.

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