this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
19 points (100.0% liked)
Fountain Pens
570 readers
3 users here now
Welcome fountain pen enthusiasts from around the world! Share your fountain pen obsession with fellow enthusiasts. Pens, inks, paper - everything fountain pen related is welcome!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That, and these days most of us seem to be the types of ~~nerds~~ aficionados who own about 427 million different pens which we switch between, so the mileage is spread out thinly across them. That's certainly how it works for me, at any rate.
For longevity, I think the switch to cartridge filling has been a major but overlooked boon to keeping pens in operation well past their sell-by dates. Plastic cartridges last functionally forever -- I have some from the 1970's that still look and act brand new -- and can be refilled indefinitely as well as fairly easily replaced (or bodged well enough) if you eventually do cack one. Contrast this to the rubber bladders in all the vintage lever/vacuum/snorkel/whatever fillers from back in the day which inevitably disintegrate and require the efforts of a dedicated individual to both want to restore the pen and have the parts and ability to do so. I think a lot of vintage pens wound up in the landfill over the years much to the chagrin of modern collectors because their sacs gave out and nobody at the time could be bothered to repair them.
Very possible. Re-saccing a pen is fiddly but simple, and I bet most towns had a few people who could handle it. The more complicated mechanisms that still relied on rubber bladders and gaskets probably took the hardest hit.
Then there's the Aero 51 and 21... find pen in drawer, flush pen, start writing with pen. Of course Parker bodged that up with the 61, LOL.