Matador Click 320

[Jeph]

Matador is one of my favorite German pen companies although they are not very well known. I landed this one quite a while ago and it was in pretty rough shape so I just tossed it into the “to do later” box and forgot about it. It caught my eye this weekend when I was looking for a pen to take a picture to help out a member restore an old East German pen. It had the look of a parts pen but at least it had a 14K nib to steal when the inevitable happened.

So I started my normal initial checks and things started looking up. There was no warpage. The nib was secure on the feed and both were undamaged. The cap held securely and posted well. The piston actually felt pretty good. The ink window was stained blue but was still functional. And during all of this the majority of the grime just wiped away. The nib looked like a screw-in unit so I tried it and sure enough the complete nib unit screwed right out. Everything looked good and secure but the nib was pretty grimy. It was so bad that I skipped the water soak and went straight to pen flush. I rinsed most of the blue ink out of the pen and tried the draw of the piston. It was strong and I could see the edges of the rubber seal in the ink window and they looked correct. That was great news but the piston unit had to come out for me to clean the ink window properly. Surprisingly the piston unit came out easily with no complaints.

There I ran into the first problem. The back of the piston was cracked. That happens when somebody screws out the piston unit with the piston bottomed against the back of the section. That drives me crazy but I see it so often that I almost expect it. So somebody had been inside this pen before. I looked at the piston seal and realized that this pen used to have a cork seal and it had been replaced with a pair of o-rings. The measured out to be properly sized so I left them alone. I thought that this was a post war pen but now I am thinking that it is not. The piston rod appeared to be brass but surprisingly there was no corrosion on it. I do not know exactly how these piston units go together so I decided against any further disassembly as everything was working fine. I did notice that the piston housing looked to me made from hard rubber so I was glad that I had not just chunked the pen into water to soak when I started. I put some silicon on the threads and adjusted the piston travel a couple of mm short (losing ink volume) to keep the load off of the cracked end of the piston and called it good.

After a short water soak and scrub of the barrel I had not really made a dent in the staining of the ink window. So it went into the pen flush and I decided to clean the worst of the crud off of the nib and then put it back in to soak. But when I pulled the nib unit out (less than 1 hour of soaking) it was almost completely clean. Most of the discoloration was gone from the feed and a couple of quick passes with a polishing cloth and the nib was finished. I tested the fit of the parts together and everything was still secure. One of the tines was misaligned so I fixed that and then turned back to work on the ink window. But there was no blue tinge to the pen flush the barrel was soaking in. I scrubbed it with pen flush and still no color came off. Bugger. I put it back in to soak some more and started working on the cap.

The cap was pretty filthy inside. There are 5 metal spring clasps that extend from a ring about half way down the barrel. I could not tell how that was installed (and therefore removed) so I left it alone. I went to work with some water and my favorite test tube brush and it promptly ate the bristles off of the brush. So I spent the next 30 minutes taking bristles out of the cap. After I while I got the inside of the cap as clean as I could although I never did figure out how to get the cap apart. After polishing the clip and the cap jewel were near perfect. The cap band has pitting along both edges but it still reacted well to polishing and I ended up with an overall nice looking cap.

I took a break for a couple of hours and then came back to work on the ink window some more. There was still no blue color to the pen flush. More scrubbing did not change anything. I got out the loupe and my barrel light and realized that the ink window IS blue and the only thing that I could accomplish was to put more scratches into it. The entire pen is covered with small scratches and drawer marks plus a couple of serious dings. It looked like a great candidate for some Novus but I decided to leave it alone for one very good reason. I was sure that I was going to be carrying this pen around often.

The thing that makes this more than just another boring black pen to me is the section contour. Because the pen has a slip cap, and the entire retention mechanism is within the cap, the barrel is wonderfully smooth. The contour fits my hand perfectly. The first time I air wrote with it, it literally took my breath away. I do not like black pens. I do not like oblique nibs. I do not like broad nibs. This black pen has an OB nib and it will still be in my rotation. That is how much I like it. And (for now) I am still too much of a purist to customize the nib to be other than what is marked on the barrel. I will probably replace the o-rings with cork down the road for the same reason but that can wait.

Dimensions:

Length Capped    129 mm  5.07 in.  5      "
Posted Length    144 mm  5.65 in.  5  5/8 "
Unposted length  117 mm  4.60 in.  4  9/16"
Cap Length        62 mm  2.43 in.  2  7/16"
Cap Dia         14.1 mm   .55 in.     9/16"  
Barrel Max Dia  12.0 mm   .47 in.    15/32"
Section Min Dia 10.0 mm   .39 in.     3/8 "

Talc added to the imprints for visibility
Matador 320 Capped.jpgMatador 320 Posted.jpgMatador 320 Unposted.jpgMatador 320 Parts.jpgMatador 320 Barrel.jpgMatador 320 Model.jpgMatador 320 Nib Unit.jpg