Now all we need is mmahany over here to lecture us for being judgmental.

I hadn't joined this forum, as the focus is more on vintage pens and serious, technical discussions (this was my impression), 

 

I know what you mean, but you're welcome to join Jon and me in the peanut gallery any time you like.

TBH, I only renewed about 3 weeks ago (when it was due); had my due date been around now, I'm not sure how I would have been affected. I do know that I'm determined to give it a year and we'll see how it shakes out. The organization stands for some good things, and this isn't the time to abandon it.

 

I joined for the first time on July 28.  Guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!  

 

But seriously, I'm not sure it would have mattered to me.  Access to repair manuals and catalogs was only part of the appeal; getting the Pennant was the other part.  I was disappointed that the recent issues are not available online, though I assumed (always perilous) there was an intentional delay between publication and posting online.

 especially how and why the most recent past owners managed to let things go so horribly wrong in less than four years after acquiring the whole of the previous Conway Stewart operation at a give-away price.

 

I read somewhere that they had 14+ employees at some point (I just can't remember the number off the top of my head), dwindling to 4-5 at the end.  That 14+ figure doesn't sound sustainable to me.  Seems like most fine writing companies one deals with are small operations that only look like larger companies from the outside.  When you need some warranty or repair work done on a modern pen, you often end up talking to the CEO!

The vintage Conway Stewart crowd is in general I think quite easy to please.

 

That may be, but the level of emotion surrounding this relatively obscure and relatively inconsequential clusterfuck is difficult for an outsider to grok.  At least it is for me.  

The re born brands seem to be fixated with the past, would Eversharp really be making Skyline shaped pens now if it had continued? Would CS have gone back to big old flat tops if the original was still going? To me the answer is no, they'd have moved with the times and pens produced would bear no resemblance to what their new reincarnations came up with. Functionality seems a point lost in a lot of cases, and some of the older companies fall into it as well. For me the 2 most user friendly things are a good clip to hold it where I put it and a slip cap for quick access yet both Eversharp and CS preferred screw caps. I was checking out some new CDAs and they showed me a Leman, wrote beautifully, well balanced etc..as soon as I saw it had screw cap I no longer wanted one and this from a company that knows how to make superb slip cap pens.  Do old designs appeal to the younger generation or do they need to be relevant to their day and age? The old companies certainly redesigned on a regular basis to move with what consumers expected. So in more general terms has the "homage" factor reduced the ability to market to the younger and potential new FP users? I think it has.

 

It seems to me that the younger market is a low-cost, high-volume market, and high-volume tends to require both good marketing and a healthy distribution network.  I'm not sure what they could have done with that market if they had really tried.  Not a lot, I think.

 

Pilot has been in continuous operation for awhile now without the need to do anything but what it thinks best, and we see both types of caps, with a decided preference for screw caps on the high-end models.  I use a number of pens with slip caps and many more with screw caps.  For me the difference in time required to go from capped to writing is significantly less than 1 second when comparing slip caps to well-designed screw caps requiring 2 turns or less.  If I didn't post I suppose there would be more of an advantage to the slip caps.  While unscrewing the cap takes time, a quick tug at a the slip cap results in the pen being separated from the cap by a few inches, which, if you are posting, must be undone, eroding the already-marginal difference.   Anyway, I strongly prefer the screw caps.  But then again, I like my large Sheaffer Flat Tops a little better than my Oversize Balances, so I might be a hard case in all respects.  

Then change the channel. No one is forcing you to read it.

 

 

I didn't say it wasn't entertaining.  And I was referring to the FPN discussion that was closed, BTW, not to the discussion here.

I find it interesting that this 'transfer of ownership' has generated so much traffic as compared to Sheaffer being swollowed by Cross.

 

On the surface of it, had been no QC issues to muddy the waters, the oversize CS pens seemed rather more appealing than most of Sheaffer's recent offerings, and CS would bring out one after another limited edition, so for folks with deep enough pockets, something was lost there.  OTOH, expectations for Sheaffer to come out with new and appealing high-end pens are pretty low.  Seems like Sheaffer's best pens of the last decade or more have been homages to a few of their best pens of long ago, and access to the originals is still pretty good.   It can't get any worse with Cross owning the brand, so nothing lost, not much drama if you ask me.  As for drama, the FPN CS forum itself is a fountain of it.

The depth of interest in the modern CS operations is interesting to me.  I get that they had a certain style, but this can be copied by any custom pen turner.  Were the later CS pens using nibs and feeds of their own make, or were they sourcing CS-branded nibs from JoWo or some such?

We  must forgive for hiding at FPN  some who are low IQ and uncertain of their positions. It is understandable.

 

Perhaps we run-of-the-mill mathematicians are more often humbled than the masses by encountering the occasional true genius.  Consequently, I try not to think about IQ, mine or anyone else's.

 

But I think the problem is not that they are uncertain of their positions.  Such beliefs can be held with a level of certainty that I would not attach to the correctness of my supposed middle name.  But they are pretty sure they will not be able to fare well in open debate because their opponents will cheat.  Ironic, isn't it?  

It's always nice when someone you don't like proves to many what they're like.

 

 

Yes, and all in addition to looking like a fool for complaining about the full-automatic bleeping.  I didn't read your earlier exchanges with him, but that guy seems transparent enough.  "I've got $x invested in CS retail stock, and I need to get my ROI, so I've got to squelch all this talk about warranties, quality control, etc.!"

The irony of a long, provocative post ultimately asking for the thread to be closed was not lost on me.  I was about to say so when Dick's commendable response to the suggestion (of closing the thread) arrived, obviating the need.

Nice.  Looking forward to it.

 

I agree.  David's wording could have been more definitive, but at least there is disclosure.  His intent clearly was not to deceive.  Knowing David personally, I understand why he chose to word the disclosure this way.
 

 

From Isaacson's Vacumania:  A serviceable user. Very even color on the gray parts (not so common  to find). Pen works well, but I have not had it restored. Cap cartouche neatly personalized  "JPF". Blind cap alignment a bit off. BLIND JEWEL AND  TASSIE appear to be  aftermarket replacements- likely Ariel's material.

 

 

 More or less "yep".

 

Although, I  chose my words cautiously and accurately; they  were chosen intentionally so as  not  to be seemingly more definitive. It is not good to sound definitive where uncertainty exists.

 

Reaper of course is both unduly concrete and perhaps deliberately misleading in his commentary. 

 

Not to kiss ass here, rather to voice disagreement with Reaper on this issue because I found his take on this wording to be petty and annoying, I think the original wording was plenty clear enough.

There are no invites, having invites implies you get to choose to participate.

Clean the threads inside the barrel or better yet run a chasing tap down them and don't overtighten the nut. Then push it where it belongs.

Got it. Thanks.

If the parts have not been sanded or reshaped in a prior restoration attempt (the left the factory round and on concentric axes) the can be realigned after restoration without removal of material.

Do you have to be invited into the Syndicate before somebody will tell you how to do this? The only degree of freedom that springs to mind without removing material is how far the filler is threaded into barrel.

I'm hardly offended. Rather, I'm fairly well entertained.

 

Of course you are.  I've seen it happen enough to know.  But I often wonder why people choose to entertain you so well in this manner.  They don't seem to enjoy it as much as you do.

The jewel looked to be purple in color. Perhaps the angle but it just looked odd to me, and wanted to know what thoughts you all had about it.. just the jewel color looks odd on that set.. I presently have three sets myself, but always looking for more depending on the price...

 

Looks a bit purple to me, too.  Never had a 51DJ.  Can ink get behind the blind cap jewel if the diaphragm fails?

I don't have a lot of purportedly waterproof inks.  Here are all three.

 

I was surprised, though, that Kiwa Guro did the worst.  I'm not certain that it is very different than Sei Boku because of the different pens used.  Kiwa Guro is coming from a wet Oversize Balance there.  The Sei Boku is coming from a Snorkel.  The Snorkel is plenty wet, but it is, as Snorkels tend to be, a very regularized, controlled sort of wetness.  An artist might be tempted to use a flex pen with the nano-pigmented inks, but I think that might tend to dump too much pigment in spots, which would leave you open to pigment migration when water color goes on top.  

This recent purchase has persuaded to give up the notion that there is a ink that does muster both for both a traditional fountain pen and a calligraphy type pen that might warrant something else.

 

So easily?  You haven't mentioned trying a single cellulose-reactive ink, nor any Sailor nano inks, even.  Now granted, most cellulose reactive inks still bleed a little, but some are waterproof.  What colors are you looking for?

FWIW, Jon, I'm still waiting as well.  I could have read the thing last week at the Commonwealth Pen Show, but I opted to defer the pleasure until I got my own copy.  Rather than agonizing, my feeling is primarily curiosity at this point whether my PayPal payment was taken notice of.    OTOH, I also know the USPS too well to think there is anything unusual about a variance of several weeks in transit time of media mail.  So the patient wait continues here...

Received today.

I know. Just messin wit cha. That, and I really wanted to get in that bit about wondering whether my payment was noticed in the first place, which remains uncertain here but at the same time of no particular concern.

I wonder if there was a faulty batch of sacs, I had one basically melt a big hole in the side of it after ~12 mths ( give or take 4,6,8,or 10) and I use fairly basic inks like Watermans.

No question it can happen for that reason, especially in a Snorkel or TD because the proximity of metal. My personal opinion when it came up back then was that the risk of confirmation bias was overwhelming once people had made the association with Noodler's inks.

So I started exposing sac fragments in Noodler's inks for long durations, with control fragments cut from the same sacs (side-by-side cuts). Ron points out that my experiments will not yield a convincing negative result, because actual usage involves inks on one side and air on the other. I concede this and considered how to modify the experiment, but in the end I decided that I was already doing all I was willing to do. Because, you see, I really don't give a rat's ass about Noodler's inks in particular. I'm just being me when it comes to analyzing information.

Long story short, nothing happened to most of the sac fragments. I don't mean "very little". I mean as far as I could tell, they were pristine, perhaps even in better condition than the control fragments in Waterman Blue. This was also true of the fragments that had been in "dryout" versions of the experiment, open vials. However, after one year, the fragment in the closed Noodler's Blue vial had lost its elasticity and become a bit sticky, whereas the control fragments were all fine. So last July, I restarted two more trials with Noodler's Blue (and another couple of inks) using a lot more sac fragments. I check on it infrequently because it did take something like a year last time before any change was evident to me.

I'm actually kind of hoping the results repeat. Otherwise, I'm left with the enigma of the first sac failure (and not of the control fragment). But if I had to put money down, I'd bet on ending up with an enigma.