Posted 25 August 2014 - 04:17 PM
You can make them yourself, though it's a bit of a pain to do. I don't know if the originals were hard rubber or not because they could have started out softer and hardened with time, though they most likely were HR.
You can turn one out of a piece of hard rubber, drill a small hole in the back end so that the thumb tack doesn't crack the HR. Or you can buy a black rubber stopper at a hardware store, sharpen one edge of a piece of brass tubing and use it to cut a plug from the stopper. Clean, cut to length and shellac the sac on.
In either case you'll fit the plug and section to the sac, and insert the assembly into the barrel with the nib and feed out. Use a chop stick or dowel to hold the plug in place while you push the thumbtack into the plug. Then insert nib and feed.
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