Apr

7

For the pencil mechs out there

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I did not write this post, and take no credit for the content. The following post comes from What’s going on at Richard Binder • Fountain Pens, so be sure to thank the author there if you like the information. Go to original source.

I never started out to do pencils. I keep saying that, but hardly a week goes by without one or two on the bench. They’re fun, actually, because there’s no decent repair guide out there — so it’s often a real challenge. Today’s pencil was an India Black ’40s Parker “51” pencil with a gold filled cap. It was “frozen,” i.e., the cap wouldn’t turn — and it wouldn’t come off either. I did get it off, but it brought part of the mechanism with it.

The necked-down open end of the chrome tube is supposed to be pressed onto a knurled collar that advances or retracts the lead; the chrome tube connects the cap to the mechanism by friction so that you can turn the cap to operate the pencil. You can see a brass collar around the chrome tube, right at the open end of the cap. That collar is supposed to be fixed into the open end of the barrel to provide a bearing surface, not “welded” to the tube by green crystalline copper corrosion.

Okay, so the first step was to separate the chrome tube from the cap. An appropriate application of thermal energy and force did the trick. Then I inserted the tube into the appropriately sized hole in one of my knockout blocks (three blocks, one hole the right size) and drove the tube out of the brass collar. The nose cone almost always screws off the front of the mechanism with no problem, and that’s what happened this time. Here are the bits and pieces, as far as I had to take them apart…

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