After @KrazyIvan posted his ‘Frankenkuli’ in the thread “show us your Frankenpens”, there were some questions about how to convert a ‘Tintenkuli’ into a regular fountain pen.
I posted a story about how that could be done in September 2016, but ‘thanks’ to the Photobucket hosting site going commercial shortly after I made the posting, all the pictures that illustrated my story were blocked.
So I decided to post the article again in a somewhat edited new 'version 2.0'.
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Once the tube nib unit of a Rotring like this has been damaged beyond the possibility of repair, you’ll end up with a nice but useless pen body, that has an excellent piston filling system. There are 2 possibilities to get it functional again: find another stylographic nib from an otherwise damaged Rotring pen or convert the body to an ‘normal’ fountain pen.
This project starts with a Rotring Tintenkuli pen that had three different problems in one pen, so it makes an ideal demonstration object.
When I found it at a flea market it looked OK at first sight. But it was definitely not OK. Look at the damaged section!
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As it is not possible to separate the section of a Rotring Tintenkuli from the barrel, this damage is non repairable. So that is problem no.1.
2nd problem. A defective nib unit. The needle is gone, probably a part of it is stuck in the steel tube. If spare nib units were available and the rest of the pen would have been OK, the problem would be easily solved by exchanging the nib unit. In this case there is no spare nib available and the section of the pen is damaged, so I have to choose for another solution.
3rd problem: a shrunken and thus leaking cork seal in the piston filling system. Possible solution: A new seal. I’ll come back to that later.
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Question: How can this pen be saved to be a functional writer again?
Answer: Convert it to a standard fountain pen with a nib and feeder and repair the seal.
So here we go.
At first, the defective nib unit is going to be used as a sleeve for a nib/feeder combination. For this project I found a nice new old stock Reform M nib (made by Bock), that looked like having the right measurements.
In order to find a ink feeder that will fit I first have to measure the inside diameter of the nib unit with a calliper.
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As it measures 4.61 mm I will need a feeder of about 4.5mm. In combination with the Reform nib it must fit with enough friction to hold the nib. Of course lots of #4 nibs that fits to a 4.5mm feeder will do.
Bingo! (When it fits in the rear, it will fit in the front).
Now the front part of the tintenkuli nib unit has to be cut off. To get a nice 90 degree cut I use a small Unimat 1 hobby lathe and a single steel saw blade.
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The cut has been made. Notice the brownish debris on the blade: ebonite!
In the modified Tintenkuli tube, the feeder and the nib fit well together.
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Next thing to do is the modification of the pen’s section. The section has to be shortened because the new nib is longer than the original stylograph system. If the section is not made shorter, the cap will not fit. In this case: this is exactly what I want. I had to remove the damaged part of the section anyway!
The pen body is mounted in the lathe and with the saw blade the damaged part of the section is cut away. See the brown dust. Ebonite again.
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After cutting and polishing the section, the nib unit is screwed in, but it is still too long for the remaining part of the section.
So I have to shorten the nib unit sleeve too…
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Now it fits. When there would not be a problem with the cork seal, the modification of this pen would now be practically ready. But I also need a new seal in the filling system to replace the defective (shrunken) cork.
As the FPG Forum software does not allow me to have more than 10 illustration inserts in one posting I have to stop my story here. But it will be continued.
In part 2 the repair of the seal and the final finishing of the pen is shown.
So, thank you for reading so far and see you in part 2 : http://fpgeeks.com/forum/showthread....042#post231042
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