So I'm restoring an old lever filler, and the lever doesn't lay flat. Not sure why. It's got nothing to do with the pressure bar. The problem exists with the pressure bar in or out (it's not a J bar, by the way. It's a flat bar that slips onto the lever and is secured in the back of the barrel via retainer).
The lever WILL go down without much resistance if you push it, but springs right back up to the position shown in this picture.
Any ideas?
Edit: Okay, so I solved this one. Tl;dr - I cut the snap ring to put less pressure on the lever, and now it'll lay flat.
Full story: So I tried what was suggested by people here, which was to put a larger sac in it. I had a size 19 in it, and tried jamming a 22 in. Still didn't work. Just to see what'd happen, I tried putting a size 18 inside a 22 (perfect fit, by the way) to see if a super thick walled sac would hold it up. It didn't. A Bic Stic barrel, however, did.
I've been trying to get this lever to lay down for weeks, so I honestly tried to think of ways I could get ink into a Bic Stic barrel without pulling the friction fit section (if it were a screw section, I honestly might have just rigged the Bic Stic barrel up to part of a sac and attached it to the sac nipple, and just removed it every time I needed to refill it). Couldn't come up with anything, because I couldn't think of a reliable way to plug a hole in it, and I don't have the equipment nor the desire to turn the end of the barrel into a blind cap.
So anyway, I tried putting the section in without the lever or the pressure bar inserted. Then, just fooling around, I wiggled the lever into its slot, and tried to get it to lay flat. And it did.
Now, that's nothing all that interesting, but it caused a revelation. The snap ring fits in the lever ABOVE the step down on the lever (I'll post pictures of what the lever looks like at the end of this post), and is therefore exerting pressure on the lever, keeping it from laying flat!!
So, some people I've talked to had suggested that maybe the snap ring has lost some of its springiness. Definitely not the case. I think the plastic shrunk very slightly which caused the ring to be a bit too big, and thus exert too much pressure when compressed inside the barrel.
Anyway, I knew that I couldn't bend the snap ring into an oblong to make it exert less upward pressure. Already tried it weeks ago, and it just reverts to its original circular shape as soon as it's forced inside. So, the only thing to do was to shorten it!
I just grabbed my wirecutters, snipped off a little bit of a spare ring (turns out a lot of old 2nd/3rd tier pens use the exact same levers and the same size rings. I got this one out of a Wearever Deluxe 100 with a broken barrel.) and shoved it into the barrel with the lever attached. It lays flat now! Stuck in the section with a freshly talced size 19 sac, and it works great!
Oh, also - this pressure bar design isn't great for use as a coin filler without some serious modification to the retainer. I tried it, and I woulda had to do some work to it that I'm not equipped to do. Turning lever fillers into blow fillers is similarly ineffective.
I'll upload pictures of exactly how the pressure bar, lever, and retainer are designed in this pen momentarily. I've gotta draw up the diagrams.
Thanks for all the help!
Edit again:
Roughly drawn diagrams here: http://imgur.com/a/OcIVD
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