My First Time and a Pleasant Surprise

This is the first time I have replaced the ink sac on a vintage fountain pen.

So what did you think I was talking about???

I am not a "pen person", I'm a pen fancier and user. I don't know much about the pens I own, most were chosen and all maintained by a late friend. When I needed a pen resacced I would just hand him the pen and he'd fix it for free. Well he's been gone for over 3 years now and all of my lever fill fountain pens do not work and I did not know how to replace the ink sac.

I had to do something so I got advice from some Twitter pen friends and a local pen collector. I bought a bunch of new sacs and some tools and materials I need to resac a pen. So here I go...

I have 2 old fountain pens that I kinda forgot where I got them from. But I believe I found them when my wife's grandparents were moving out of their large home in Nu`uanu into a 2 bedroom apartment in an assisted living facility. I assumed they were inexpensive Sheaffers.

So I took them apart. I didn't take any pictures because I didn't think I was going to blog about this. I did take a picture with my iPhone when I broke the vent tube inside of the old sac.



I removed the left over section of the tube and reinserted the longer broken piece. I don't even know if this pen could write, I was primarily learning to resac a pen.

Anyway I cut off the old sac and cleaned the barrel, applied shellac and installed a new latex sac. It was not as easy as I thought it would be, it took some doing but I got the new sac on. I was going to make a joke about another latex product procedure that this reminded me of but I so won't go there!



When I was polishing the pen I noticed that it was an Eversharp and not a Sheaffer.



I looked at the nib with a loupe and found that the nib is 14k solid gold.



After letting the shellac dry overnight I filled it with Private Reserve Cosmic Cobalt.

And here was my pleasant suprise!

There was nice amount of flex to the nib and it wrote really smooth and soft. It's not a fine nib so it doesn't have the line variations I like, but it's a really nice writer.



This is a nice pen I can use to write, not letter or do "calligraphy". If I can write without worrying about ascenders, descenders, ovals, etc...I hope the words will flow from the writer in me on to the paper!

Being that it was Kung Kung's pen, I think there's a bit of mana with it too!