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How Do I Polish a Pen? Celluloid Edition

By on November 8, 2024
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Polishing a vintage pen can be a surprisingly dangerous exercise in vintage pen restoration. If you use the wrong method on the wrong material, you will ruin your pen. If you overdo it with the correct method and correct material, you will ruin your pen. We will not be held liable for any problems that arise from your efforts to polish your pens. This is simply an explanation of what we do and have found success with with on our own pens. We do our best to warn about some of the pitfalls but we cannot guarantee we have explained all of them. Results may vary.

First gather your pen and Micro-mesh sanding cloths at your water source under bright light. You can see both the grit and cloth sides of these strips of various grits spanning 1500, 3600, 6000, 8000 and 12000.

This article explores wet sanding structurally sound celluloid pens by hand to a high-gloss shine. Never wet sand a pen made of hard rubber, especially if it has any sort of chasing design or imprint. Never wet sand a metal pen, either. Never try to wet sand a celluloid pen that is krazing or otherwise deteriorating, as you will destroy whatever is left of it. In this piece I take two heavily damaged Parker pens and restore their luster. However, before I got started on either of them, I examined them carefully to make sure they were free of that shattering plastic look called krazing and cracks in the barrel. A hairline crack in the lip of a cap is okay to wet sand, as long as you are very careful with it as you progress.

WHAT IS WET SANDING? Wet sanding is using different grits of specialty sand “paper” made out of cloth to first rough up and then smooth out the celluloid of a pen with some help from water.

I like using strips of a product called “Micro-mesh” cut into 2-inch by 6-inch sections. I use them in the grit levels of 1500, 3600, 6000, 8000 and 12000. Even if you only have one strip of each of those grits, it can last you dozens of pens.

WATER: You can use it two different ways. One with a thin stream of luke-warm water from a tap or the other way is in a large mixing bowl full of luke-warm water. The latter saves some water, and you can see just how crazy dirty plastic particles can get. Your hands are going to be in water for more than an hour, so you might want to wear some latex or rubber gloves.

This is a Parker Duofold with a Vacumatic filler. It actually survived Hurricane Katrina nearly 20 years ago. It looks very tarnished and filthy and worn and awful.

HOW IT WORKS: The process to wet sand a pen to near perfection is simple but very repetitive and time consuming. You will want a well-lit area near your water source. There is much better lighting by my bathroom sink, so I make sure to have my 5 strips of Micro-mesh at the sink along with the pen I want to work on. I set a steady but thin stream of water at a temperature I find comfortable from the tap. Next I wet my strip of 1500-grit Micro-mesh. It doesn’t matter if you start with the cap or the barrel, but I like to start with the barrel because it takes longer.

With the Parker Vacumatic pens I have chosen, I take off the main cap but leave the blind cap tightly secured to the barrel. I also have already replaced the diaphragm. This way, if there is a little blind-cap misalignment after the repair, I might be able to smooth it out a bit.

As a right-handed person, I hold the section of the barrel in my left hand. I take the first strip of 1500-grit mesh in my right hand and wet it under the running water. To help keep track of where I am at, I start with the open nib of the Parker Vacumatic facing up. I extend the barrel under the running water and I make 10 complete cycles of rubbing with the mesh strip against the barrel from the section threads to the tip of the blind cap and back to the threads. The 1500-grit mesh is going to scrape off an entire layer of the celluloid, removing the minor scratches and imperfections. Be careful, as it might also remove the last of a shallow barrel imprint! What luster your barrel might have once retained will look horrifyingly dull and scratched. Now I rotate the pen about an 8th or a 10th of a turn and do 10 more cycles of rubbing under the water. You will want to check that the mesh overlaps the original first cycle’s path to make sure you didn’t miss a spot. Take your time and be thorough. Keep the barrel under the running water or in the bowl no matter what grit of mesh you are using. Let the sanding mesh pass through the water. This helps remove the scraped away plastic…and it keeps the sanding from doing more harm than good. Dry sanding can wreck the finish. Keep rotating and doing 10 cycles until the barrel has been uniformly sanded by the 1500-grit mesh.

After the first round of wet sanding is finished, I like to dry off the barrel to inspect the progress and make sure I didn’t miss anything.

The hurricane survivor is halfway done. Notice the barrel is refreshingly shiny and clean compared to the untouched cap. Please notice the cap’s clip has been removed in preparation to wet sand the rest of the cap.

If everything looks evenly done, I take up my next strip of the mesh (3600 grit) and repeat everything I did the first time with the first strip. HOWEVER, now I do 20 cycles of sanding for each turn of the barrel. The reason is simple: That 1500-grit mesh really wrecked the celluloid and dug some deep sanding grooves into the barrel. 3600-grit mesh is half the strength of the harsher mesh and it take more effort to uniformly start cleaning up the damage from the first time through the process. Once you have uniformly polished the barrel with the 3600-grit mesh, dry it off and examine it.

Don’t be scared that the barrel still looks awful. Under that bright lights look for imperfections within the imperfections. The scuffed barrel will look even worse in a spot you missed. Imagine you just hired a local teen to mow your lawn. Before you pay this person, you check to see that they didn’t miss a spot or leave a thin strip of the grass that is much taller than the rest of the yard. Unlike a lawn that is easy to cut back down to size, a poorly wet sanded spot in the celluloid will only start to look worse, as the finer grits can’t fix what the harsher grits missed. As such, if you jump straight to the 6000-grit mesh, you might accidentally engrain a piece of the 1500-grit polishing portion that only the 3600-grit process can get out. If you find a spot you missed, just put that spot back under the water and give it another 10 cycles of 3600-grit sanding to see if that evens out the spot. Dry it off and check. Keep going until the spot looks uniform to the rest of the pen. You’ll mess up because you are new to it. It takes time and experience to catch the nuance of the sanding levels and how they look. If you get too ahead of yourself, just remember to go back to the stage you think you missed it at. It takes longer but you can correct the mistake.

If the 3600-grit polishing run on the barrel looks uniform and complete. Do it all over again with the 6000-grit mesh. ONLY THIS TIME, do 30 complete sanding cycles for each turn of the barrel. Again dry it off and inspect it for uniformity when you are done. Now it should look like you are making good progress. The finish will start turning from cloudy to glossy…like a fog is starting to lift.

When you are satisfied the 6000-grit work is uniform and complete, move on to the 8000-grit. Now make it 40 complete sanding cycles per turn of the barrel. If you are an impatient person, you might be tempted to call it “Mission Accomplished” when the 8000-grit efforts are dry and uniform. BUT, trust me, there is still a slight layer of haze in the finish of the celluloid.

The 12000-grit mesh is so smooth to the touch, even when dry, you might swear it isn’t gritty at all. However, once you’ve now made 50 complete cycles of wet sanding per turn of the barrel, you will be astounded once you have dried the barrel and made sure the work you did was uniform.

Here is the completed Parker Duofold. Notice the little blemish to the left of the clip. It was way too deep for the wet sanding to polish out of the cap.

Unless there are deep divots or scratches in the barrel, your barrel will now look like new. To help seal that finish and keep the pen shiny, I take just a tiny drop of mineral oil on a cotton rag and rub down the barrel. I then buff it with a dry cloth to remove any excess mineral oil.

With the barrel done, you can repeat this process all over again with the cap. Parker Vacumatics and “Duovacs” (slang for 2nd generation Parker Duofolds with vacumatic filling systems) are fortunate to have removable pocket clips. It is easier to wet sand a cap without its pocket clip. BUT, if you can’t remove the clip, that is okay. Just take your time and polish under the clip. Some people like to mask off the cap ring(s)  while wet sanding the cap. You can brass/remove the plating on the cap bands if you wet sand them. However, if your pen is so ugly that you have to wet sand it, it likely was never going in a museum collection to begin with. Personally, I find it is just easier to wet sand the bands and take the risk. Sometimes they come out looking like new or sometimes I strip the plating. In either case, they are shiny.

PRO-TIPS & TRICKS: Start with a pen that you can ruin and not worry about. As with any new experience, it takes time to perfect the technique and find the ways to grip your pen parts and mesh to maximize comfort and effectiveness.

Wet sanding a complete pen takes me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half. I save it for pens that are desperate for the tender loving care.

One of the things I mess up the most are the ends of the cap and barrel. It is soothing and easy to wet sand the middle of a cap or barrel. It is easy to forget to get all the way to the barrel threads or end of the barrel…or each extreme end of the cap. Sometimes before drying off and checking to see how I’ve done, I just go back and work around the ends a second time to make sure I got them right.

Vacumatics were made for this type of polishing. Other pens with more exposed metal parts require more effort to keep them safe. For example: A Sheaffer Balance Lifetime is a great candidate for celluloid wet sanding. You just need to take extra steps to protect it. By keeping this lever filler in water, the inner J-bar for the filling system will get very wet. There is no way to get around that. Sooo, when you finish your polishing of this barrel, shake out the water, dry it as thoroughly as you can with Q-tips and then set it so that a little fan can blow room-temperature air into it overnight. If you completely dry it out as quickly as you can, it won’t rust and cause other problems. Only after it is completely dry should you finish the restoration by resaccing it.

Hopefully, this will help you make some of your favorite vintage and modern pens look like new. Please feel free to ask questions. This system works well for me. I know other people who have their own ways of polishing their pens that are different from mine. There is always more than one way to accomplish a task. Best of luck.

Here is a hurricane damaged Parker Vacumatic with nickel trim. It might look hopeless, but….

Wet sanding has renewed to finish of that poor hurricane ravaged Parker Vacumatic to make it look as close to new as possible.

How Do I Restore A Parker Vacumatic

By on October 19, 2024
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This is a new old stock Parker Vacumatic Maxima in the “Golden Pearl” design. Check out the barrel clarity!

When it comes to vintage Parker pens, Parker Vacumatics are my favorite. I love their stunning art deco designs and over-complicated filling system. The pens have some quirks, too, but, I still love them.

As the Roaring Twenties came to a close, the Parker Pen Company knew it had to build on to its huge success with the Parker Duofold fountain pen or risk losing momentum in a very competitive writing instrument marketplace. Kenneth Parker, son of the company founder George Parker, figured the answer to this problem was a sac-less fountain pen that held more ink than most any other pen on the market. The key to the new pen would be a vacuum pump that used a rubber diaphragm invented in 1928 by Arthur Dahlberg. It was a device that Sheaffer, Waterman, Conklin and Wahl-Eversharp turned down. That device would be the foundation of a pen Parker first released to the public in 1932 as the Golden Arrow. Yet, the company would soon rebrand it the Vacumatic.

More than a Vacumatic-filling Parker 51, this is the rare, legendary “yellowstone” color in like-new condition.

During the next 16 years, Parker would feature the Vacumatic filling system in 3 of its most famous pens: the Vacumatic, the 2nd generation Duofold and the Parker 51. If you get into vintage pen collecting, odds are really good that you’ll encounter numerous “Vacs” that need repair. Restoring these pens is both easy and complicated. It really just depends on how lucky you get.

Parker Vacumatics and 2nd generation Duofolds with Vacumatic fillers (sometimes called DuoVacs) were made of celluloid. Celluloid is a beautiful plastic but it ages inconsistently. Some Vacs are as strong as they day they were made. Others that were exposed to prolonged heat might be brittle. In my own very non-scientific experience, I find that the “grey pearl” models of Vacumatics are often very fragile. Soaking the celluloid too long in plain water can damage a pen. ANNNND, for the love of all that you hold dear, keep celluloid pens away from open flames. When celluloid catches fire, it burns fast and hot, like a traffic flare. How do I know? One of the original fountain pen repair books said that one should heat a pen up over an open flame to make it easier to open. I did just that, when I was still learning, and holy cats! I had to leave the damned flaming pen at the bottom of a steel sink filled with water before it would finally go out. NEVER USE AN OPEN FLAME. Turns out hair dryers work just fine.

Vacumatic enthusiasts divide these pens into 3 generations. It is vital to know which generation pen you are working on. 1st Generation pens have a lockdown vacuum tail filler and often an integrated section and barrel. As such, you can’t always unscrew the section from the barrel, as you would the 2nd and 3rd generation pens. Plus, when removing the filling unit, you must first unlock the plunger so it is fully extended. Attempting to remove the filling unit with the plunger locked down will destroy the plunger and filling unit. (Authentic replacements are very hard to find.) 2nd Generation pens still have an aluminum plunger but no lockdown device. They usually have a section that unscrews, too. 3rd Generation pens have a plastic plunger and unscrewing sections. These were World War II production models, and aluminum was rationed.

On the left is the Vac Extractor Tool and to the upper right is the “stocks” style Vac unit tool. A Parker “DuoVac” awaits them below.

Unlike most pens which can be restored with the same tools, Parker Vacumatic pens need a special filling unit tool that helps you to remove and return the filling unit into the tail of the pen. I use two different types depending on the challenge of the job. My favorite looks like a medieval stocks with two different size (threaded) holes and is tightened with screws and an Allen Wrench/hex key. The small hole is for debutante and standard/major-sized filling units. The larger hole is for the oversized Maximas. I generally prefer it, as it makes resetting the new unit with a lubed diaphragm a little easier. The other design that I like was invented by Scott Pauley at The Inky Nib. He calls it the Vac Extractor Tool. Unlike the stocks tool that I normally use, this tool has the tightest threaded grip imaginable on the filling unit. My “stocks” just can’t get a tight enough grip on maybe 1 in 20 filling units. That is when I break out the V.E.T. to get the job done. Very clever design, fairly easy to use.

For today’s demonstration of Vac repair, I have chosen a 1945 Parker Duofold with a vacumatic filler. As with the 3rd generation Vacumatics and early Parker 51s, it has the plastic plunger unit. It also has a section that you can unscrew.

As usual, I start by soaking the nib and section with water just deep enough to cover the barrel threads for an hour or so to leach out the old ink and help loosen the section. An hour is usually safe enough not to damage the celluloid with the water emersion.

This is a close-up of the extracted filler unit in the stocks.

After drying off the nib and section, I test to see if I can unscrew the section with section pliers and just a few seconds of heat from a hair dryer. If I can get it started, I leave it for later. Then I thread the filling unit into the stocks and tighten up the stocks. Next I take the hair dryer and apply a few seconds of even heat around the celluloid tail of the pen. I grip as much of the barrel of the pen as I can in one hand and then slowly apply pressure turning to the left with the stocks. I am lucky with this pen that the unit unscrews fairly easily. If it fought me, I would apply a little more heat at a time until it finally gave way.

 

Watch how the wooden dowel pushes up through the section side of the barrel to remove the old diaphragm from the barrel.

After the tail-end is open, I then unscrew the section with the nib and feed all still in place. The reason that I don’t unscrew the section, even though I’ve loosened it, is that I want the added strength and stability of the celluloid at that end of the barrel while pressure is being applied to the tail end. The tail end experiences more torque and a little more fragile than the section end. I don’t want to accidentally squeeze the barrel too hard so that I crack the open end.

Sometimes the threaded black-plastic portion of the filler unit comes out, but the plunger portion remains stuck inside the tail. Sometimes the remains of the decaying rubber diaphragm remain stuck in the tail of the barrel. In these situations, I use a wooden dowel to remove them. After the big parts are out, then you need to use a dental pick or some other device to make sure all of the old diaphragm is out. You want to be especially careful with the barrel’s inner threads.

Here is the “field stripped” view of the pen. Note that I do not disassemble the section, nib, feed and breather tube. They are all perfectly happy in place 90+% of the time.

Once the pen is disassembled, the real cleaning begins. There is a trend lately among new vintage pen collectors/repairers online to prove their street cred by also knocking out the nib and feed from the section. This is entirely unnecessary the overwhelming majority of the time and risks breaking things that are perfectly fine as they are. At this point, I just dunk the still fully assembled section in the sonic cleaner along with the cap and barrel. It usually takes fewer than 5 minutes of cavitation to get them clear of old ink and debris. When you are done, dry it all off. I like to buff up the 14k gold nib…if I am not at risk of removing any two-tone plating…apply a little “Super Lube Silicone O-Ring Lubricant” to the section threads and screw it tightly on to the barrel again.

Can you see the little pellet ball in the top of the plunger from this view?

At no point did Parker actually use any glue on these pens. However, over the years, various repairmen did use glues and shellacs. That brown crud on the bottom of the plunger three photos up from here is old shellac. I scrape it off with a razor. (Please note that I leave the filling unit in the stocks for the duration of the restoration process. This helps me to make sure the proper depth is achieved when I screw the unit back into place so that the tail cap and barrel will realign properly.) Then I try to carefully remove the pellet from inside the plastic plunger’s cup. It was really difficult to get a good photo of that annoying little ball. The goal is to minimize damage to the cup of the plunger. I recently discovered there is a man in the UK who make a dremel-friendly drill system to drill out the pellets, but I have not yet tried it. Typically, I use a pin to try scooping out the pellet. It deforms the cup a little, but I try to pinch the cup back into shape when I am done.

Trim the diaphragm at roughly the point you see where I’ve lain a pin over it in the photo. New diaphragms are usually way too long to work properly. It is vital that the diaphragm can be stretched with the plunger to the point where it almost touches the breather tube inside the barrel. However, if it is so long that it impedes the function of the breather tube, the pen won’t fill or empty properly.

Inside the diaphragm is a new pellet. To start reassembling the filler, you will need to carefully get that rubber dip end of the diaphragm with the ball/pellet in it into the cup of the plunger. Once the diaphragm is secure in the cup of the plunger, you are going to hold the diaphragm in place and push the plunger up through the center of the diaphragm and invert the diaphragm from its original starting position. Once you have the original open lip of the diaphragm rolled down over the plunger, pinch it with your fingers to that metal cone part that I used a razor to scrape the shellac off of. Also make sure the same cone is held into the black-plastic threaded part of the filler unit so that the plunger is fully extended by itself without the rest of the parts joining it. This is tricky and likely doesn’t make any sense until you actually do it for yourself. While the unit is is pinched and the plunger and diaphragm stretched fully, dab some of that silicone lubricant all over the diaphragm. Finally insert the lubed up mess into the tail of the barrel. Make sure to twist the barrel back and forth so the stretched diaphragm doesn’t get stuck on the sides. Don’t release the pinched cone until it is as deep into the tail as your fingers can let it be. It should snap onto its seat when you release it. Finally, you can screw the black-plastic threads back into the barrel. If all goes well, the unit it will feel tight right where you started at. However, even when things go well, sometimes they don’t stop where you started. NEVER overtighten the filling unit. If it starts to snug up early, that’s okay. Sometimes, you might have to unscrew the stocks and reset them a little higher to finish tightening a little deeper than before. It is far more important to get the right snugging of the unit, as the unit holds the diaphragm lip in place while the plunger creates a vacuum with the rest of the rubber. If you overtighten, you can blow out the entire barrel and make it inoperable, ruining the pen. If you don’t get a tight enough closure, the diaphragm will get loose and not work. Don’t worry if the blind cap doesn’t align as perfectly with the barrel as it might have done.

At this point, it is safe to try test filling it with water. Remember it takes 10 to 12 pumps to fill it all the way. If everything looks like it is working okay, the only thing left to do is to polish it to a beautiful luster. Personally, I think wet sanding works best on Parker Vacumatics, 2nd Generation Duofolds and 51s. Tune in this November for our wet sanding tutorial.

Here is our fully restored Parker Duofold from 1945. That wet sanding really makes it stand out