I haven’t decided whether it’s a “he” or a “she” yet, but my very first vintage fountain pen is a Waterman Junior. As with all firsts, I probably paid too high a price for it and will probably proceed to take too many pictures of it. Notice how the cap is a little misaligned with the lever? I think I should give it a name based on that feature.
Without context, it looks cigar sized, but it’s called Junior for a reason. Here it is compared to a Lamy Safari, which is a relatively thin fountain pen. See? It’s tiny.
Fountain pens, even very expensive ones, are simple creatures. Delicate? Maybe, but still, simple. Experts will charge $30-40 to replace an ink sac when the parts cost only a few dollars, and the labor takes no more than 10 minutes. I don’t think this pen is worth that much, so when I couldn’t get the lever to a 90 degree angle from the pen, like it’s supposed to go for filling, I took it apart.
Most lever-fill fountain pens, like this one, have barrels which are friction fit to the nib assembly, so a bit of rocking and pulling action will get it right off. It seemed that my pen had been fitted with a nice replacement ink sac — that rubbery thing at the bottom. So, why didn’t the lever work?
It turned out the barrel was crammed full of mummified bits of old ink sac.
After coaxing all of those out with water and Q-tips, the lever mechanism worked just as it should. Hooray!
All of the writing in the above pictures was by the pictured pen. And the ink, in case you were wondering, isn’t a fancy ghost grey. It’s water and whatever used to be in the ink sac. I know, I’m so posh, aren’t I?
