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The Swan Visofil V (Vee, not five) was made from 1935 until 1937, when it was replaced with the 'VT'.  It featured a 'concertina' type filling system involving an open ended tube, rather than an ink sac.  Along with a spring, a see through filler button, and a very long breater tube the system took up a large amount of ink and allowed the ink level to be viewed by inverting the pen. Disassembly is quite straight forward, the whole assembly comes out with the section as it is removed in the normal fashion.  As usual, a little heat is...

The Parker 41, only made between 1956 and 1958 is now quite a rare pen.  The more prestigious, and more common Parker 51 was, and still is, heavily 'cloned' but the 41 seems to have escaped the attentions of the Chinese Parker copy industry but these pretty little pens seem to be the exception. They are marked '616' but are smaller than the 'Hero 616', the most common Parker 51 copy although overall design and build quality is very similar.  I bought these pens about 10 years ago, more out of curiosity than anything else, I have never used them but...

The Noodler's Nib Creaper is a medium sized piston filling pen with a steel semi flex nib.  This pen is the third Nib Creaper I have bought, not because I was unhappy with the others, exactly the opposite.  My daughter is keen on calligraphy and really liked the Nib Creaper so I gave it to her as a present and bought another pen.  Shortly after my son's partner, who is a writer took a fancy to the pen for signing copies of her latest book so I gave that pen away and have just taken delivery of this pen. I bought the...

The Parker Duofold has been around, in one form or another, for about a hundred years.  It started with the 'Flat top', the most famous of which was the 'Big Red', this was followed by the 'Streamline' version, the button filler, the AF, the Aerometric, and now modern cartridge/converter versions. The so called 'Aerometric', this pen, was introduced in 1953.   It is not a difficult pen to disassemble, as with most pens the difficulty arises when bits that should come apart easily don't, due to them being clogged with the residue of dried ink or the overenthusiastc application of...

The Parker Duofold Junior is a delightful pen to use and is also a joy to work on.  I thought it might be useful to show how the pen comes apart for a restoration. The pen dates from the 1930s, it is a 'Streamline' Duofold, so named because of the slight tapering of the barrel and cap, its predecessor was completely cylindrical.  It is a button filler with a 'hanging bar' to compress the ink sac.  This is quite an elegant arrangement and is quite handy during dismantling and reassembly as it allows for the section to be a push...