Hello!

I'm Courtney and I like to repair vintage fountain pens. I collect old and neglected fountain pens and restore them back to writing condition either as vintage pens or hybrid pens. This site is where I'll share information about both kinds of pen tinkering.

You can also browse my inventory of pens for sale.

How did I get here?

On a visit to an antique store in the not-so-distant past, I stumbled on a teeny fountain pen among the available wares. I had some modern fountain pens, but none that were remotely that small. I wanted to find out more about this pen! While the body was in good shape, it didn't have a nib. But it also wasn't very expensive, so I brought it home to learn more about it.

I learned that my new companion was a Salz Peter Pan ringtop pen, and I started browsing auction listings to try to find another Peter Pan that could provide a donor nib. After a bit of searching, I found one! It came in a listing with a handful of other fountain pens from an estate sale. I also ordered a ridiculously small ink sac (a number 10, for those who are curious), some shellac, and some talc. And I set out to repair my Peter Pan.

I started with one of the other pens from the auction lot. If I recall correctly, it was a very dinged-up, solid orange generic ripoff of the Parker Big Red. The nib was missing an entire tine somehow, but I figured I could practice everything else. Reader, I failed utterly. While impatiently trying to get the section out of the body, I completely shattered both pieces. Humbled, I chose another pen and tried again.

This one was an ugly, generic lever filler with a burgundy-brown body and a metal cap so cheaply manufactured that holes had worn in it. Using a lot of patience and gentle wiggling motions, I got the section out of the body successfully! I also successfully got old, crusty ink all over myself. I persevered and cleaned the old ink and ink sac out of the pen body before also removing, cleaning up and reinserting the pressure bar. I felt extremely victorious! I didn't have a sac big enough to go into this pen, and decided that I wanted to try that. So I ordered more sacs in various sizes.

While waiting for my order of additional parts, I selected another pen from the auction lot to practice on. This one was a comparatively fancy and fairly small Sheaffer Balance 250! The nib looked a little wonky but probably usable. I thought perhaps this one would be my first completely repaired vintage fountain pen. I struggled again with removing the section from the barrel. I knew by now to be patient with it. I also now knew that heat was one way to help things along, so I got out the hair dryer to help me out. With my heat source in hand, I proceeded to promptly set the poor Sheaffer's section on fire. Burning celluloid is very impressive! I managed to put the fire out, though, and eventually completed the steps involved in replacing that pen's ink sac to get it writing again. I felt great that I'd gotten a roughly century-old pen to write once more; I also felt frustrated that I'd committed a minor act of arson in the process.

Despite my shame regarding my pen crimes, I was hooked. I found everything about the process enjoyable: the patient prodding to get the section out, the satisfying creation of forbidden tea while soaking the dried ink out of the feed, the scraping out of every last shard of old sac, the anticipation of waiting for the shellac to dry after installing the new one. After an unqualified success with replacing the sac within an Esterbrook desk pen, I finally tackled the Peter Pan and emerged from that effort victorious, with a functional, wet-writing (definitely ideal for tiny sacs that hold approximately 3.4 drops of ink), unreasonably tiny pen to show for it! I'd found a cool thing in an antique store, figured out what it was, learned how to fix it and had a neat new pen to boot! I wanted to do it again.

So I did. Many times. I've added numerous vintage pens to my own collection at this point, but I can't keep them all. Instead, I list them for sale and send them off on new adventures. These pens shouldn't languish in storage until they need to be repaired again; they should be used! Take a look at what I've got in stock and see if there's something there that you'd like to bring into your collection.