1946 Parker Vacumatic Azure Blue Pearl $200 US SOLD

This pen has sold!

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Inkquiring Minds Pen Resurrection Sunday! My name is Doug, and I’m back with another vintage fountain pen. I’ve been doing a lot of restorations of Parker Vacuumatics lately, mostly because I love restoring them. They’re very popular, and usually, I restore one of these gorgeous 1940s stacked celluloid Parker vacuumatics. Within minutes of me posting the video for members only, they get snapped up, usually several weeks ago.

I recently restored this 1942 Parker vacuumatic, which is unique because it has a golden pearl barrel, a silver pearl blind cap, and cap silver trim. It also has a beautiful 14-karat gold nib that works perfectly. It’s just an amalgamation of two different pens, and you can see the resurrection of this pen by clicking right up there if you’re interested in purchasing it. It’s still for sale, so contact me at inquiringminds@gmail.com and let me know if you’re interested.

People are more interested in these Azure blue Parker vacuumatics, this one from 1946, and this will be the subject of our restoration, reclamation, resurrection today. This is what’s called a Parker Vacuumatic Junior. It has the two cap bands and no blue diamond on the clip, as I understand it. There are various levels of cap bands: two, three, and wide. This one has the wide band with the chevrons on it and the blue diamond on the clip. This is from 1945, so this would be called a senior.

This is my prized possession, which had a broken nib and a ground-up section. I restored it by custom grinding it into a stub and custom shaping the section. It’s why it’s so special to me: it writes like a champ, and when this pen is all cleaned up, it will look as beautiful as this one.

However, there are some challenges with this pen. On the outside, we see that it is in perfect shape. It’s dull from more than 75 years of use, but the first challenge we see on the outside of the pen is this blind cap. It’s in rough shape. Someone was a real biter. Biter people love to bite their pens for some reason I don’t know. They should stay away from vintage fountain pens if you bite them. If you’re a biter and you want to buy this pen once it’s fixed, I won’t sell it to you. It’s just that plain and simple. But look at this gouge right here! This one is really deep, so I’m going to try to sand out those gouges without drastically changing the shape of that blind cap. That’s going to be challenge number one. When you open up the pen, challenge number two is going to be this nib. This nib is seriously twisted, seriously bent, and seriously gnarly. 

THOUGHTS

So, what are my thoughts on this pen resurrection? I think my microphone gave me more trouble than this pen did. I expected the opposite. The big issues with this Parker Vacuumatic were the incredibly gnawed and chewed blind cap. We don’t gnaw on our kitty, which was scarred beyond recognition. Now, it’s pristine and perfect. That was very satisfying to get that way because when I started shaving it down, it looked pretty awful. You know, your heart goes up into your throat when you start grinding away celluloid. But I don’t think it looks bad at all. You wouldn’t even notice those scars were there.

The other main challenge with this pen was the nib. It was in such a terrible shape that people probably gave up on it. I’m going to put this pen up here on one side so you can see its current condition. On the other side of the screen, we’ll show some photos of the nib before I started working on it. I was very pleased with how it came together fairly quickly using my pen tooling nib pliers. They’re very useful, even though I got the tines back together again. It rode okay, but it was like a fire hose. Usually, when a nib gets bent, it gets a little bit of a waffle or something like that. This one had the wave, but it was in this direction. It was along the slit. Maybe I can draw that for you. Here’s the tip of the nib. What ended up happening was there was a bit of a wow going on like that. So, this gap right there was allowing the ink to flow way too freely. The tines were together, but there was this gap right here, and that was a bend when this tine here was lifted up. So, what I ended up doing was this. This took me several hours over a couple of days. I would take my pen tooling nib pliers and apply them like this. Just gripping and then squeezing gently, squeezing together the tines. They were aligned perfectly, and I just kept squeezing. And what that did was reduce that gap. So, now the nib is writing very nicely. It’s still very wet, but it’s not such a gusher anymore. The final challenge was the clip jewel, which wouldn’t come out. Someone had glued it in with shellac, and only the heat from my heat gun released it. Trying to put it back together was difficult because there were remnants of the shellac, so it took me several hours of carefully teasing it out of the soft plastic threads.

The clip itself came up beautifully polished, just like the cap rings. The whole pen is now flawless and writes beautifully. It takes about 1.1 ml of ink, slightly smaller than I’m used to (I’m used to about 1.3 millilitres). However, the diaphragm, which I inspected with my inspection camera, showed that it’s in very good shape and pliable. It might have been cut a little too long, so it’s taking up more capacity than normal. If you cut the diaphragm at the right length, it won’t take up as much capacity in the barrel.

Another pen resurrection success! This one was particularly satisfying. I said at the beginning that I would make this pen look just like my beloved 1945 Parker Vacuumatic Azure Blue Pearl, and you can see that they are both gorgeous. If you put them side by side, you can see the slight difference in the blind cap. You’d have to see them side by side to notice that this one slightly tapers more than this one does, but on its own, you wouldn’t be able to tell.

I already have one of these beautiful pens, so I don’t need another. I’m going to sell this pen for $200 US plus shipping. If you’re interested in purchasing it, just drop me a line at inkquiringminds@gmail.com with your name and address, and I’ll get you a shipping quote. Shipping to North America is about $10 these days, and I’ll also send you instructions on how to pay me via PayPal. If you like this video, please like and subscribe. Don’t forget to ring that bell to get instant notifications whenever a new video is posted. You can also join my channel as a member for only 99 cents a month. I guarantee I’ll answer your comments in the comment section, and you’ll get cool emojis, badges, sneak peeks, unboxing videos, and instant access to new videos as soon as I post them. You’ll also get a leg up on the competition for purchasing this gorgeous pen. Don’t be surprised if it’s already sold by the time this video is public on Sunday. Thank you for watching! 

And that's all she wrote!