On Call: a smashed fountain pen resuscitated

Since the majority of the pens I have been making are similar to pens I have already posted, I thought I would put up something a bit different. 

I rarely enter into the world of pen repair, as there are folks out there who do that for a living on all brands of pens.  Instead, I just do occasional repairs on pens that I have made that got damaged through various  accidents.



It can be tough being on call.  Alone, standing between life and death (of a pen), making terrible, heavy decisions with every action.  Knowing that at any moment, your peaceful world of happy new pens will be torn apart by the needs of a poor, injured pen damaged by some horrifying accident.  But, someone has to do it.  So when I got the call about this poor Bamboo style polyresin pen, I could not say no.

When you have a pen made of polyresin, always think 'safety'.  This is the second Bamboo style pen in this particular polyresin that I have resuscitated back from near death.  The first one was a pen whose packaging was utterly crushed during shipping to NY - the box arrived quite thoroughly squished, and the pen was shattered.  This one suffered the fate that some clipless pens can suffer - slipped from a shirt pocket and fell to the hard, cold floor, there to shatter into several pieces.

                             

       (The above photos were bravely taken by Mr. Shawn Newton near the scene of the grisly accident)

So - How to perform a resuscitation to bring this poor, suffering pen back from the brink?   First and most importantly, the assessment.  The nib section was intact (sigh of relief...we have a pulse!).  Next up, the barrel.  Gasp - the barrel will not connect to the nib section, nor even the cap on account of injuries to the threading.  It is utterly paralysed!  Finally, assessing the cap itself, I find it functional - the threading in the cap is all intact, though the cap is horribly disfigured by a large chip.  This may require some plastic surgery...

The barrel was the tricky part.  Gluing the pieces back together would only be a temporary fix.  It would buy us a bit of time, but with the weaker glue joints, the prognosis would remain the same - recurrent dismemberment (shudder).  So the only option was to shear off the remaining thread, drill a new mortise into the barrel, and insert a new tenon, which I then trimmed down to the appropriate diameter, drilled out to size, and threaded inside and out with tap and die.  After some trimming, the threaded tenon is once again solid and fully functional.  Our patient writes a line or two for joy!  

Now, the cap.  Since I was missing pieces, I could not even consider gluing it all back together to heal this disfigurement, though in this case the weakness of the glue joints would be less of an issue.  Well, can't be helped.  Wait a minute....it occurs to me that I have another Bamboo cap from a pen I never finished many months back.  Can we do a transplant??  Only if they are compatible...holding my breath I check the specs, and the diameters and threading are the same!  We have tissue compatibility!  With a little trim to the rim of the cap, it fits on the new barrel tenon like it was meant to be there, with barrel thread nicely aligned to cap thread.

And the patient lives!!

Well, another emergency resolved, another patient well again.  My work is done here.

This is Dr Goretex, signing off.