Materials & Supplies
Parker 51 Vacumatic Cap With Gold Split Arrow Clip – Before & After Restoration
Here’s a quick post to show you what I’m working on currently. Just a little effort combined with the correct products and tools can go a long way in fountain pen restoration.
Shown below is the cap from a Parker 51 Vacumatic showing how it arrived to me for restoration. As you can see, it’s a Lustraloy cap with a gold split arrow, blue diamond clip. I’ll restore the blue diamond later in the restoration.
Here’s what I wanted to show you today. The magic of Parker 51 Vacumatic cap restoration. This took me about 15 minutes using a little dab of Simichrome Polish, a few Q-Tips, a micro fiber cloth, and a rouge cloth. Beautiful! The gold split arrow blue diamond clip looks as good as new. I did one like this last week that was probably 10 times worse and I forgot to take the “before” pictures. Dang!
Stay tuned for more.
~ Glenn Atkins
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How To Make Your Own Fountain Pen Flush
Hello and happy Thursday to everyone! This is going to be a real short blog post to show you how to make your own fountain pen flush for pennies on the dollar when compared to the commercial stuff.
Here are the things you are going to need:
1 Gallon (128 ounces) or 4,000 milliliters of distilled water
1/2 Gallon (64 ounces) or 2,000 milliliters of unscented ammonia (or gallon size if they have it)
1 Measuring cup
Another container to hold excess distilled water
Some math skills
5 minutes of your time
Begin by removing 20 ounces or 625 milliliters of the distilled water from you gallon or 4 liters. This will leave you with 108 ounces or 3,375 milliliters of distilled water. You can either discard this or save if for the next batch of pen flush or other household uses, which is what I do.
To your one gallon container that now contains only 108 ounces of distilled water, add 12 ounces of the unscented ammonia. You can get ammonia at almost every grocery store. What you end up with is a solution that totals 120 ounces, 12 of which, or 10% are ammonia. For the metric equivalent you would add 375 milliliters of ammonia to your 3,375 milliliter container of distilled water to bring the total volume to 3,750 milliliters, 375 of which, or 10% are ammonia.
No matter how many ounces or milliliters you begin with, what you want to end up with is a mixture of 10% ammonia and 90% distilled water. Remember that it’s important to use the unscented version without any other additives in it like lemon or whatever.
Whether you are doing the Imperial or Metric version of this potion, add three to five drops of blue colored Dawn dishwashing liquid to your batch to increase its lubricity. Shake well.
Enjoy your pennies on the dollar pen flush!
~ Glenn Atkins
Triumph Vintage Fountain Pens 