Wizard Wednesday: The Fountain of ... ink?

I like fountain pens. I have always liked fountain pens, from the time I was given one when the fam left Indonesia. It was a going-away/graduation/something gift from UPCS/MIS when we left. It came as a set, with a ball point and a pencil, or something. All three of them had my name engraved on them (they must have paid some engraver a good 50 cents for the work too; I miss cheap labor) and they were just all around awesome. Anyway, that was my introduction to fountain pens, and I've been a fan ever since.

That same fountain pen has sat in various of my drawers since about a year after I got it, because it stopped writing well. I think it was because the converter got squashed or something, so I couldn't fill it, and by the time I tried fixing the converter, it had dried up to the point that it was unusable.

A few years later, Mom found a three-pen set by Sheaffer, which I'm pretty sure was in their Award line, which is no longer being made. The two rollerball pens in the set were/are pretty nice, and I still have them (although I haven't purchased fillers for them since the originals emptied) but, of course, the highlight of the set was the fountain pen. It was a nice, hefty pen in stainless steel with brass or gold (not sure which, but probably brass) trim, and it had the nice, screw/piston converter, which was much easier to use than the squeezy converter on my first pen. I used that pen for years, until I left it in a denim shirt, and left that shirt in an airport.

A couple years ago, I found a little, hole-in-the-wall office supply shop which was a short lease thing where the guy basically had a bunch of office supplies he had accumulated somewhere that he wanted to sell off cheap, so I bought my third fountain pen, a Sheaffer White Dot cheap0, with a black plastic 'chassis', which looks like crap, but writes like butter. Something happened at some point which caused me to stop using the pen, which caused it to dry out, which confirmed my lack of use.

Yesterday, I got to hankering after my old Sheaffer Award fountain pen, and started looking online for fountain pens, only to be reminded that a CHEAP fountain pen runs about $35. I managed to swallow my disappointment and went home, where I found pens 1 and 3 (the one from Indonesia and the black plastic one). While watching some tvd, I grabbed them and spent some time rinsing the old, accumulated ink sediment out of them, and managed to get Blackie working again (minus the bent clip, which is what happens when you clip them on your pocket and then snag them on something), but Silver (as in, Hi-O) still didn't want to write well without having to write slowly or press really hard, either of which experience is analogous to writing with a nail dipped in glue. But I stuck it in my pocket and brought it with me today anyway.

During a bit of down time, I looked up fountain pen maintenance and found this site, and learned a bit more about how the pens are made and how you can take care of them. After fiddling with Silver for a couple of minutes (most of which were spent removing the bit of paper I got stuck in the nib because I wasn't being careful enough), I am thrilled to say that I have restored this 15+ year old pen to working condition and it too writes - to borrow a phrase from VeggieTales - like butter on a bald monkey.

Hooray for decent craftsmanship, and for that personality quirk that says, "Don't throw that away, you may find a use for it some day!"