Shift in the lines

As is usual, I've been going through a bit of a shift in interests.  My attention span never holds for very long, though it can be intense...

Everything has settled a bit on the computer front, so I guess it was times to go to another obsession:  Pens.

A while back, I had a bunch of vintage fountain pens come back to me after spending months at a repairers.  All of them were suffering from filler problems.  (For those of you who don't get into vintage fountain pens, this means the pens were having problems with the mechanisms for getting ink into the pens.)

One of those pens was a true "grail" pen for me: An OMAS 361.  This is an Italian-made pen from the late 1940s-mid 1950s.  It's a very interesting design, owing a bit to the American Parker 51, but with some unique twists.  The pen can be rotated, allowing you to write on either side of the nib ("top/bottom"), which allows you to have either a broader wet, flexible style, or a fine, stiff style.  Mine appears to be a later model 361, with a gold-filled cap on a black resin body.

The piston filling mechanism was shot on mine, so I'd sent it off to be repaired.  And I was dying to get it back.  It came back with the filler fixed, but with a new problem that only manifested after the pen had been filled for a while.  Ink was seeping out around the area where the section hood meets the body of the pen.  (Sorry if this makes no sense.  I don't have any photos, which would make this much easier to understand.)

Disgusted, I put the pen away.

A few days ago, I took the pen out again, and decided to dust off my old repair skills.  I removed the hood of the pen, cleaned it, put a little silicon grease (as a sealant) at the meeting point of the hood and pen body, and reseated the hood, making sure it was adjusted properly.

To my surprise, I've had no problems with the pen.  It writes beautifully.

This, and accidentally stumbling across a Parker rollerball I thought I'd lost, kind of kicked me back into my pen mode.  I've been doing some cleaning and refilling, and have actually been making use of my journal, which had been rather fallow of late.

I did snap a quick picture of some of the pens, very difficult to see on the keyboard of the T61.  

Three pens, barely visible.

The pen at the bottom is the OMAS 361.  The pen at the top is a Montblanc 32S (late 50s into the 60s), which I was having some flow problems with, but seems to be better after a good flushing and refill with different ink.  The middle pen is a contemporary Conway-Stewart 100, which still continues to plague me with some flow problems on certain papers.  This really annoys me, as I do like the pen.  I flushed it and filled it with a very free-flowing ink, which helps.  (I previously disassembled the feed on this pen, and was appalled at how poorly designed the feed channels [which carry the ink from the internal reservoir to the nib] were.  But that's a story for another time.)

This is just a small sample of what I've been playing with over the past few days.  I've also had out a Conway-Stewart Churchill, the aforementioned Parker Mosaic Duofold rollerball, a Montblanc 100th Anniversary, a Montegrappa Estra 1930, and various Visconti pens (including a Romanica, a Wall Street, an Opera Master, a Metropolis, and 3 different variations on the Divina model.)

So many pens, so little to write...