Pen Repair Tips

I notice a lot of searches like “Snorkel Repair Manual” or “How pull apart parker”, and after only a little more than a year of keeping this blog it strikes me that I might provide some quick references for some popular repairs. Most of what follows is just links to pre-existing pages of mine.

No Specific Maker

• Resacking a lever or button-filling pen

Parker

• Vacumatic filler repair (requires special tools)
• Parker 51 Vacumatic exploded view.  To remove the hood, which is the only real excursion from the previous point, warm the area ahead of the body ring to about 145F, which is just about too hot for your fingers to stay exposed to.  Reseal hood with shellac when finished, but not before you’re certain of the alignment of the point and the hood.
• Parker 51 Aerometric exploded view.  Same heat as previous to loosen threaded components.  Not all sac protectors are threaded, some just pull off, but heat is still needed.

Sheaffer

• Sac and seal replacement on Touchdown models (includes Imperials).
• Sac and seal replacement on Snorkel models.
• Vacuum-filler or “Wire Pens”– seriously think about whether you want to attempt this yourself.  It’s tricky, and a mistake can easily destroy the pen.  If you’re set on doing it yourself, do some reading.  Go to the Repair Forum at the FPN, Richard Binder’s Reference pages, and perhaps order a copy of this rather good manual.  The better thing to do is to contact one of the following people and ask them to do it for you (the first three are official, Sheaffer-authorized repair providers, and this is a non-exhaustive list; there are others out there who can do it):
  • Richard Binder (US)
  • Ron Zorn (US)
  • Berton Heiserman (US)
  • Sean Gosse (Canada)
  • Lawrence Oldfield (UK)