Putting a new sac in.

[Slivovitz]

I don't have illusions of becoming a pen repairman. If I need difficult work done on a really nice pen, I'll send it to a professional. Still, putting a new sac in a cheap pen seemed like something that would be fun to do, and well within my capabilities. So I picked up some cheap pens to work on. The Wearever pen/pencil combo on the right was bought separately; the two Wearevers and the Esterbrook that you see left to right, were part of a lot.



It went very well. I had the Wearever that you see in pieces on the left completely assembled before, but I took it apart again, and am going to store it this way. The nib is pretty much a lost cause (it's not a stub, it's broken, but not worth paying for a nibmeister) but maybe another one will come my way. Anyway, it holds ink just fine. The sort of camouflage one next to it writes well, and shined up nicely, although I didn't try to shine the nib. The combo on the right is a very nice writer, at least the pen is. The pencil takes an old size 1.15-1.2 mm lead, which I do have, but it was hard to get the short piece that it holds to click into place and stay there. Got it in the end, though.

The Esterbrook was a minor disappointment. The seller had said that he hadn't tried any of the pens and didn't know if they would work, so I expected to restore it. In fact, it turned out that the sac was just fine, and no work was needed, although I did swap out the nib. Well, I got a working Esterbrook for $7 and change, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Now of course I didn't need any of these, but it's nice to have a pen that you fixed up yourself, even if it was only something simple like this. I followed the instructions on Richard Binder's reference pages. The camo Wearever was the only one where I needed a heat gun to get the section out.

[Yanks27]

Not bad. It took me 2 pens before I was able to take the body off, without breaking or burning the pen. I should have listened to practicing on the junkers.

[nemo]

Good job! Glad it went well for you ... fun stuff.

It's amazing that some of the Esterbrooks I see have the original sac (ESTERBROOK written on them) and they are still pliable and perfectly usable.

[Slivovitz]

I wanted that last pen to be complete, but I didn't really feel like buying a nib for it. And I had several spare Esterbrook nibs, two of which are the 1550 fine bookkeeping nibs that I don't really like all that much anyway...

It turns out that if you remove the outer layer on an Esterbrook renew-point nib, both the feed and the nib come out, and they actually fit in the section for this Wearever.



Voila, an Ester-Ever. I probably just annoyed some hard core Estie fans, but it works.