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Jeph
October 13th, 2013, 03:16 PM
A while back I snagged a pair of ragged looking Parker Parkettes. When they arrived, the green one had nice color but the nib was a generic steel replacement and the barrel was badly cracked. The grey one had excellent color, but apparently the owner used the pen as a drumstick as both ends of the pen were covered in dings. The clip was also slightly bent out and the trim was worn but the nib was in good shape. I can’t remember now what part went where, but one section had issues and the other feed had decayed into uselessness. Although both sections were interchangeable in either barrel, the feeds were not interchangeable in the sections. So I had a good feed that was larger in diameter than the section. After a lot of work with micromesh and some wet 600 grit, I managed to get the feed to between .1995 and .2005 inch diameter to fit within the .202 inch diameter bore. I had intended to put the clip from the green cap onto the grey cap but I decided not to tempt fate any further and after smoothing out what I could of the dings I called the restoration complete. It was a lot of effort but it writes wonderfully and looks great as long as you don’t look too closely, yet is not particularly valuable and not in collectable shape so I have no reservations whatsoever putting it into use as a daily user pen. I am very happy with the purchase. The pictures follow and additional details (and more pictures) are offered after the pictures for those that are interested.

Parkette Dimensions

Capped Length 121 mm 4.78 in 4 3/4 "
Posted Length 145 mm 5.70 in 5 3/4 "
Unposted length 112 mm 4.42 in 4 7/16"
Barrel Length 81 mm 3.20 in 3 7/32"
Cap Length 53 mm 2.08 in 2 3/32"
Barrel Max Dia 12.1 mm .48 in 15/32"
Section Min Dia 9.1 mm .36 in 11/32"
Section Length 14.1 mm .56 in 9/16"

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When I tested the nib it had an annoyingly loud hum. I could play music by varying my writing speed. It got louder the faster that I wrote but it did not make ink splatters when I wrote very fast like resonating tines do. What was strange was that the writing was smooth, but loud. I tried more smoothing but nothing seemed to help. I reset the nib deeper on the feed (and therefore deeper in the section since the feed position did not change) and it got much smoother. After a little more smoothing the nib was silent and butter smooth. I used it almost exclusively for a week at work and it only hummed once, and that was when I wrote a doctor style lightspeed scribble signature. There was also a great deal of ink creep onto the top of the nib but that did not bother me. What did bother me was that I managed to get 3 ink drops over the course of the week. I am worried that the ink creep is a symptom of whatever is causing the ink drops. I am further concerned that the polishing of the feed from resizing it is what is causing it. It writes with a wonderfully (but not too) wet fine line with nearly zero line variation with pressure. I love the way that it writes, so if nothing changes with more use I may sacrifice the new sac to attempt to stop the occasional ink drops.

There are some interesting facts about these pens. The grey one is dated coded 4Q 1936 and the green one is coded 2Q 1937. Although that is pretty close together, and the size of the Parkette was never officially changed, the two pens have some clear differences. The easiest to notice is the length of barrel threads. The grey one has 0.23 inches of threads while the green one only has 0.15 inch. Furthermore, the green barrel is about 1/8 inch shorter than the grey one at 3.09 vs. 3.20 inches. Furthermore, the green barrel is larger in maximum diameter than the grey one, at 12.4 mm (.49 inch) compared to 12.1 mm (.48 inch). That does not sound like much but sitting next to each other the difference appears significant. The dimensions of the caps are effectively identical (within .020 inch) in every dimension and are interchangeable. I don’t know if that is due to shrinkage, expansion, or both so I just used the dimensions of the grey one in the table provided.

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There are also some curious features to the nib that I have. It is date coded as 4Q 1936 like the pen, but according to the data that I have found it should be a gold plated steel nib by 1936. Even after cleaning, polishing and all of the torture associated with trying to fit the feed to the section I can find nowhere on the nib with any hint of anything other than gold at 10x magnification under a strong white light. In addition, only the Parkette Deluxe pens were supposed to have the arc behind the breather hole. It is possible that this is a donor Deluxe nib that just happens to have the correct date code and if it was two tone the silver coloring has long since worn off as there was no traces of any additional coating on the nib when I removed it.
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Proofread edit: As a somewhat unrelated note, look at how much difference lighting plays in how the pens look. I need to get better, or at least more consistently bad, with the lighting.

Post submit edit: I have no idea why the last picture is there. It has something to do with trying to replace the posted picture as I had forgotten to shrink the original. But I don't see where the one at the end is in the text so I won't try to delete it.