Monday, October 18, 2010

Parker Latitude Fountain Pen Revisited

One reason I wanted to get to the NYC Pen Show early in the morning is that I had some pens I wanted to get checked/tweaked, among them my Parker Latitude Silky Black medium nib. This pen was something of a disappointment as it was either too dry or too wet or wouldn't write at all, and I was wondering if the nib might be the problem. Turned out it was in more ways than one.

The tines of the nib were slightly bent upward and skewed, which made the ink creep up onto the top of the nib but also made it harder for the pen to work properly. The pen went from Pendleton Brown who diagnosed the problem but didn't have the tools with him to fix it, to Ron Zorn who I was waiting for regarding another pwn, then back to Pendleton Brown for some nib work. As he said, this nib just asks to have a little something extra added to it.


First, the pen now works wonderfully well. My mouth dropped when I started writing with it, as it wrote just the way I had wanted it to back in April when I bought it from Fountain Pen Hospital. The nib wasn't aligned correctly out of the box, nothing I could have done about it on my own.

Then Pendleton Brown started playing with the nib, scratching away and working with it to see what took his fancy. He didn't want to make it into a plain old italic, but he wasn't sure what it needed. This ended up as a stubby italic something-or-other, and it's really fine by me.

As you can see from the pic above, I'm really enjoying writing with my "new" Parker Latitude.

2 comments:

  1. Nice pix, story. Was a warranty repair possible? Brian Gray and Parker75 (Li-tah?) both have Web sites I learned plenty from. Jack/Youngstown

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  2. I wouldn't have know about the problem until it was taken care of, and Ron Zorn very generously didn't charge me it took him about 3 seconds to do it.

    Parker75 was at the show, that's how he found out one of his rollerballs had an exploded refill in it--the pen leaked all over my hands as I was looking it over.

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