Rescued a broken Aurora 88K

[penwash]

Got this pen last year as part of a batch of unrestored pens. Been procrastinating in restoring it because I've been busy with work and other pens. But last week I decided that I'll give it a go.

First of all, this pen already is in a rough shape. I don't know what happened to the section, the imprint is scuffed up, then there is this coarse/abraded "ring" near the nib. It can't be the cap, maybe an attempt to open the section. The cap has also lost it's gold filling in a few places, though overall it doesn't look bad.

The piston is super nice. I really had to hand it to Aurora, when it comes to piston construction, they are the top quality one from Italy, I think. This old pen, used up as it looks, has the smoothest piston, which unfortunately doesn't work because the seals inside is gone.

So now it's time to open the section, fast forward two days and a lot of heating and soaking and grunting later, the section is separated from the barrel. Then the bad news hit. The piston seal assembly which is ingeniously designed, came out with the tip broken, so now I'm left with a hexagonal shaft with a stump and a hole at the center. Even if I can find the right o-ring to replace the hardened old seals, what am I supposed to do with the hole which would compromise any attempt from the piston to build a vacuum.

But first thing first, I reached to my collection of o-rings and I found that the C-sized ring that David Nishimura sells would fit perfectly. And I mean perfectly, it slides and "hug" the piston shaft, then inside the barrel, it slides effortlessly but snugly against the barrel, sealing the barrel to create the vacuum that is needed to suck ink into the barrel.

NOTE: This restoration is not possible if the pen was made poorly. In fact, the rest of the piston assembly is solid that the only breakage is on the hexagonal shaft, which I can deal with.

Now to take care of that pesky hole left by the broken tip. After thinking about it for a long while, I took a note from my restorations of safety pens and Japanese eye-droppers. Synthetic cork to the rescue, I took out my smallest punch and created a tiny cork capsule, just large enough that it can be squeezed into the hole and expand to fill the space perfectly. As the result, with the hole plugged up, the pen started to take water in. Yeah!

So after applying some silicon grease, I can fill the pen with ink.
I'm going to test the pen for a few days and see if it'll write with the ink instead of coloring my fingers.



Stay tuned.