CONWAY STEWART 58 (1954-63)
Welcome back to Inkquiring Minds, my name is Doug, and thanks for joining me for another Pen Resurrection Sunday on Inkquiring Minds. Today’s cadaver on the slab is this Conway Stewart model 58 lever filler from the later period, so the late 50s to early 60s.
This pen was made famous, if you are a pen-nerd and can see the pen in the scene, in the film Indiana Jones and Last Crusade, where Indy’s father, played by Sean Connery, squirts ink from a lever-filling fountain pen into the German’s eyes prompting Denholm Elliott to say “The pen is mightier than the sword!”
I’m going to triage this pen first to show you its condition and determine what it might require to bring it back from the dead. If I have time and the resurrection goes well, I’ll talk about some history of the Conway Stewart pen company. I’ll try to show all the various processes involved in the restoration of this fountain pen. And if I get it writing I’ll do some writing samples and follow up with some thoughts about the restoration.
THOUGHTS
So what are my thoughts on this restoration? This went very smoothly indeed. The only bump in the road was my own lack of care in identifying the material correctly. I DID say celluloid on video, you heard it. But it didn’t actually register in my brain as I was working on the pen. So when I put the PVC sac on, I didn’t think anything of it.
While I was waiting for the shellac to dry, I was reading through the Conway-Stewart webpage and discover they used celluloid up until 1965! I had assumed they had stopped in the mid-50s making this model 58 plastic. But no… I smelled the barrel carefully and it is indeed celluloid. So I replaced the sac with latex.
The PVC would have worked for a while, but it would have eventually rotted the celluloid from the inside out. So, now the pen fills with ink, is shiny like new and writes like a dream.
The nib only required a tiny amount of tweaking with micromesh.
Some of the cadavers on my lab slab aren’t so pretty and will take some work. I’ve never tackled fixing a nib quite so mangled as the one on this Parker Challenger from the mid-40s.
This belongs to a friend and she asked if I could look at it and get it writing. We shall see.
I’ll try out my new nib burnishing tool courtesy of Bill - I guess I should name it as well - Bill’s Burnisher. There you go. But that is another dead pen for another resurrection Sunday.
For now, I’m pleased that this Conway-Stewart is living again. I might decide to sell this pen. I dunno. I’ll write with it for a while and see how attached I become.
If you’re interested in the pens I DO have for sale, just go to my WIX site listed in the description below.
And there you have it.
And as always, thanks for watching,
And that’s all she wrote!