Parker Insignia

Parker Insignia

The Insignia was one of Parkers top of the line writing instruments, and was produced from 1991 to 2008. Here today for your viewing pleasure I am showing four of them – two ballpoints and two mechanical pencils. Insignia’s carry production date letters so I can say the items shown here span virtually the entire period of production.

Parker Insignia - a superior choice for the office

The Insignia is a fairly long slim pen and the decoration is all about the long lean stripes running down its length.

Some only have the stripes on the top half.

The classic black and gold combination.

The Black Sticks are very happy to have just won gold

Insignia - gone but not forgotten. 
Farewell sad and stripy.

Rubber Madness

Back in the mid 00's there was an outbreak of the dreaded Rubber Madness in the Avery design department.

They got swept up in some sort of mass hysteria and next thing the Avery Nexgrip ballpoint pen and the Avery doubleClick multi-pen ended up in my hands. Urggghh! Now you know I would never buy those rubber horrors, so don't ask me how I got them, I just did, okay.

It's awful. I worried about breaking out in hives when I first touched the Nexgrip.

Full body rubber grip.
Quelle horreur!
Es una abominación!!

Not so terrifying, but still enough to put me in a spin, the doubleClick multi-pen. 

Only a partial rubber body :) It is a twist action multi with one ballpoint tip and one 0.5mm mechanical pencil tip.

But there's more bad news.

Another red card for Dave!
Can you see it?
"doubleClick TM"

In my One-Man War Against 'Double Knock' it appears that like Vanishing Point, Double Click is also toast.
Double Action is probably gone too... I think I'm in trouble.... Retractable Tip, Retracta Point... so few options left :)

Luckily the I think the rubber madness outbreak has been brought under control at Avery, because I believe both are discontinued.

Back With Triple Sets

I shut this blog down a few years ago and took it offline a while back, but I have recently been trying to get my "pencil-life" better organized. Part of that has been the long overdue decision to reorganize (down size) my collection. Over the years I have ended up with a lot of stuff I don't really want. Things that looked good online but aren't in the hand, duplicates, minor variations, etc, etc, etc.

The review of things to keep or sell got me thinking about triple sets - fountain pen, ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil. Not that they were ever that common 30 - 50 years ago, but I guess they are basically a thing of the past now unless you make up your own one by buying three separates. I do have a couple of triple sets... but not for much longer :)

Conway Stewart

Pilot

Faber-Castell E-Motion - the one I'm keeping, although it is a make up of three separates in a flip top hard case.

So, someone who knows about ink, why isn't the Faber-Castell nib gold?

From The Desk 3

The shameful truth is out, Dave cannot live by pencil alone. He also requires ink.

A bit over a year ago I decided to push the boundaries and every time I went to use ink I asked myself the question “Do I really need to use ink for this? If I used pencil and someone erased it, or altered it, would it matter? More to the point, would it hurt me?” The answer was usually “No” so I started using pencil for even more things – signing memos and purchase orders at work, signing bank cheques (but still writing the amount payable in ink) and so on. No one has ever challenged me, and nothing bad has ever happened.

Still, as loathe as I am to admit it, the permanence of ink does have its uses. Only a real idiot would fill out the amount payable on a cheque in pencil, and the G-man insists on ink when you fill out your passport application form which seems fair enough.

So, on those rare occasions that I reach for ink, here’s what usually ends up in my hand - the Cross Century II ballpoint pen, in royal blue with chrome trims. Cross item 412WG-24 to be precise.

When it comes to writing instruments blue is one of my favourite colours, and this is a nice deep semi-lustrous blue body.

Twist action to advance and retract the tip. The top half of the body pulls off to replace the ballpoint pen refill. I use black ink. I occasionally hear a small squeak from the twist mechanism, but pulling the top off and back on seems to fix it.

Here’s my review of the Cross Century II mechanical pencil.

The Dark Side

I suppose it’s inevitable really, at some stage or other it probably had to happen. You can’t go buying lots of pencils made by pen companies and not have some thoughts of the Dark Side flit through your mind. This week, gentle reader, we journey into the realm of the Ink Lords, as I put myself to the test, face the Sirens of Inkish Temptation head on, and see if I can remain true to the graphite. Will I fall like Anakin Skywalker, or emerge like Luke?

So exactly how did I come to possess these instruments of liquid ink? Well, with my “Conway Stewart phase” in full swing, most vintage CS pencils for sale in this part of the world are sold as part of a fountain pen & pencil set. Thus to get my hands on the pencil, I had to buy the pen. Soon the little voices of temptation started whispering in ear. Go on, it couldn’t hurt, just buy a bottle of ink and give one a try. What harm could it do?

Actually it was little bit harder than that. Firstly of course these pens are many decades old, so they need servicing and new ink bladders before being filled with ink. Sometime earlier I had discovered that, much to my surprise, there is actually a guy here in NZ who does fountain pen servicing. Astonishing! Anyway, I sent my pens to him and then everything was ready.

So here they, are my two Conway Stewart No 15 pens, one blue marble / black veins the other green marble / black veins. I believe CS no.15’s were produced from 1952 to 1963 in the UK, and they were a common brand and pen here in NZ. I must at this stage apologise for the state of my photography of these pens. My camera is just a basic Kodak digital, and although I think my photos have got a lot better over the course of this blog, I can’t do justice to these marbled pens. They really are quite beautiful. Deep vibrant lustrous colours that come from way down inside the body of the pen. Good quality gold plated metal trims. Even after 50 years these gold trims show little evidence of wear. I think that Conway Stewart were one of those companies that marketed “top quality, but at an affordable price” - making good quality writing instruments for the market at large. The green pen was auctioned by a local person, and I arranged for my wife to call around to their workplace, and pick up the pen set. It turned out the seller was a young doctor, who had used the pen at school. Very unusual in this day and age, but his school insisted all students used fountain pens to learn the art of good handwriting. No ballpoint pens allowed on school property! He had always admired his grandfathers Conway Stewart, so when he had to have one for school, he saw this set in a car boot sale and bought it, and then used it through his studies. But then time moved on, he hadn’t used it for many years….my wife was half expecting him to back out of the sale, or shed a tear. Anyway she assured him it was going to a good home! Well, at least the pencil was. Moving right along….

So, my pens are serviced and ready to go. Down to the local stationery supplies store for a bottle of ink – I chose Watermans blue/black.

I had read a little on writing with a fountain pen, and a few people had given me some advice, so I knew to only press lightly, to let the nib glide over the paper, not push it into the paper as I can be prone to do with pencil and ballpoint. Every nib has its own “sweet spot”, the angle and position at which it works best, find that spot, and you are away.

I guess at first I was little afraid of the pens, or rather of them leaking and making a mess everywhere. You certainly do need to treat them respect, compared to a ballpoint pen. You can’t wave them around or just throw them down onto your desk like you can a pencil. You also need to answer the question, “To post or not to post?”, as in “Do I stick the cap on the end of the pen when writing, or not?” Personally I found either way alright to write with, but I generally prefer a heavier, and top-heavy feel, so in the long run I would probably be a “poster” and write with the cap stuck onto the end of the pen body. This probably does lead to some wear or damage on the body over the long term.

I quickly noticed that if my paper wasn’t dead flat on the desk then I did get some “drags” between letters. Also things were not so good if the writing surface wasn’t smooth – a thin sheet of paper on a lightly patterned desktop and the inkflow would become irregular. You also have to wait for the ink to dry, which may take more than a few seconds, but to experience the true sensation of a 1950’s businessman, I thought I should speed things up and invest in a couple of vintage ink blotters. Genuine “artistic” blotters from the 1940’s through 60’s are seemingly cheap and plentiful. I got these three - purely for historical research purposes you understand!

There was a huge difference in inkflow between my two pens. Both had Conway Stewart 1A nibs, but they worked best at quite different angles, and the green pen just hosed out ink in comparison to the blue pen.

The coverage of fountain pen inks is no where as solid as ballpoint pen inks, but I guess that’s inevitable as ballpoint ink is so much thicker and viscous. Also when you start writing with the fountain pen the very first part of your first letter can be missed as the inkflow hasn’t started in time. I did have occasional trouble with leakage on both my pens. It was almost as if the ink bladder had become pressurised and was forcing the ink out. A blob would form under the nib. I returned them to the serviceman for another look, but he said they were working fine, although I could try a different ink. I was sort of left a bit stranded, because I don’t think they were working quite properly, and I didn’t want to go buying half a dozen different brands of ink to muck around with.

Well eventually my trial was over, I had walked into the Inkish Abyss, and emerged from the Dark Side, seemingly unscathed - I think I will use these fountain pens every now and then, but I’m a graphite person, through and true.

Ancient Swamp Pen

Some of you may have read my Carpenters Pencils posting that Pencil Revolution was kind enough to publish. If you have, then you may recall that I have a family relationship to trades involving wood. Some time ago my mother was visiting her brother who is a retired wood-turner, and he was making some wooden pens from ancient wood. My mother thought “Ah, now there’s a birthday present for my history loving, pen / pencil loving son” so that’s how I have this pen. Now I know this blog is called “Dave’s Mechanical Pencils” and it’s not a mechanical pencil, but I’m sure you can understand there is a certain sentimental value, so it is here as the first pen to feature on my mechanical pencil blog.

“About 26,000 years ago a huge volcanic event in the central North Island of New Zealand toppled trees, blocked rivers and created swamp areas when it deposited vast quantities of ash over the area. Logs that were submerged in the swamp did not decay because the chemical mix of the swamp preserved them. In 2000 AD some logs were recovered from the Reporoa swamp and milled. Some of the off-cuts were made available to local wood turners. 26,000 years buried in the swamp has darkened the timber to a lustrous ebony colour. The general condition of the timber is exceptional considering its history.” Source “Reporoa Swamp Matai” (edited) leaflet that accompanies items made from this timber.

My uncle lives near to the source of this timber and is one of the wood turners given the off-cuts, so its a genuine story. These sorts of “swamp” timbers are not common, but they are certainly not unknown or rare here in NZ, and this wood has been carbon-dated. It is Matai (Prumnopitys taxiflora), a coniferous tree species endemic to New Zealand, much valued for its strength, durability and hardwearing non-denting properties. In the past it was frequently used for the flooring of schools, churches, ballrooms, etc but these days it is generally too expensive and rare for such uses.





My pen and a piece of the swamp Matai showing bark and inner wood.


Forestry in New Zealand is now totally dominated by exotic plantations of Pinus radiata, that’s the Monterey Pine to any American readers. New Zealand is arguably the world leader in plantation forestry. For example the largest plantation forest in the world, Kaingaroa Forest (2,900 sq km or 717,000 acres), is here in NZ and planting began over 75 years ago. Some compartments are now having their third generation of trees milled. The Monterey Pine has been selectively bred so that maturity now takes only 18-20 years. Interestingly I’ve never met a Californian who recognised a New Zealand Monterey Pine as anything like their tree back home. Actually I’m not sure many New Zealanders would know what a Monterey Pine is. Here they are just Pine trees. There’s only one species, they’re all the same, millions upon millions of them, straight row after row, marching on up and over the hills.... But I digress….

So, basically my uncle has a supply of gold-plated pen trims, and then turns pen bodies from wood to make the pen. This is a twist action pen taking a standard type refill. It is 140mm long and 13mm diameter at the widest point. For those who appreciate wooden objects, then it is a wonderful treasure. Say no more.