This is the story of a pen from one of my fellow Dallas pen club members, Marco (of avilapens).
At the Dallas Pen Show last September, Marco showed me a pen that he found called Hoover. It's a vintage pen made out of celluloid that in passing, looks quite ordinary. Until he described it to me as a mystery, because when disassembled, none of the parts match any popular filling system. We looked at that pen closely, but at that time I just took a wild guess at how it could have worked.
Nice guy that he is (and knowing me well enough to predict that I won't be able to resist any puzzles that looks like a fountain pen), at the last pen club meeting last week, he gave the pen to me, and he basically said "have fun figuring that one"
So I tried many things (I'll tell this part of the story in another post, because it's long) but none sticks, until I read a decade-old thread on FPN that talks about guesses that a pen that is similar to this one may have been "inspired by" the Parker Vacumatic filling system.
Still, none of the parts make any sense to operate like the plunger filler on a Vacumatic... until I made a discovery that is the key to the puzzle. Once I figure out that missing puzzle piece, I was able to approximate the filling system, and the pen would fill with water (and ink) using the exact principle as a Vacumatic plunger. I'm currently testing it.
So there you are, in the photo, the "real thing", a Parker Vacumatic Standard Lockdown (first version of the vacumatic filler to be mass produced), with the Hoover pen that was "inspired by" it.
In the next post, I'll post a restoration diagram of the pen and we'll look into the pen some more.
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