hello there welcome to my channel my name is doug and i'm back with another fountain pen video
hopefully this one will be brief because it's a follow-up
on my review that i did last week of this 1988 parker duo fold centennial and you can see that
video by clicking right here in that video i had a flow issue with the 18 karat gold nib on
the centennial the pen had been uninked for many years and after an ultrasonic bath in pen flush
it rode okay but the nib seemed to be starved of ink and i was reluctant to pull the nib as
the pen doesn't belong to me the owner gave me permission to continue to work on the pen and i
wanted to show you the results of about a week of effort to get the pen riding properly right now
so here is the parker centennial duo fold it has this gorgeous 18 karat gold nib and a very
special feed design as you can see there are no fins on the bottom of the feed as you see on most
modern fountain pens parker said they had computer designed this feed so that the pen would be usable
at most normal aircraft flight levels as you may or may not know the fins on a typical feed
are ink collectors any small changes in air pressure or temperature will cause the air to
expand inside the pen's ink storage system whether that be a converter cartridge piston what have you
and when the air expands it forces the ink out of the pen and it burps either into the
cap onto your paper or in your pocket most modern feeds with these fins those fins are collectors
and they collect that overflow or that excess so without fins how does this parker feed accomplish
no burping well the fins are in the inside but the fins aren't what controls the flow of ink
so much as the channels that allow the ink to seep down to the nib using capillary action it took me
about three days of soaking this nib to get it to the point where i could pull it from the section
it wasn't the soaking so much as the warm water that i finally used to free it
and this is what i found inside so finally after soaking it for three days i got this nib and feed
out of the collar of the parker duo fold it took some doing but you can see why it was getting
stuck here it has some kind of blue gunk which i had seen under the nib right there and there goes
the nib you can see all of that blue gunk right there so i'm going to clean this out and soak
it some more and brush it with a toothbrush do whatever necessary to get that gunk out of there
because that's obviously what was impeding the flow and then we'll put this beautiful nib
back in the duo fold and uh right with it a bit so i finally got all that stuff out of this feed
uh it was just caked with all these blue particles here's the biggest one
i had and i don't know what it is but it's like a melted plastic uh but it's still kind of elastic
you see it's kind of coming apart maybe it's blue because of the ink but it's like contact cement
and this end on these fins right here there was an even harder uh crystallized kind of a glue
material that went down all the way there's a tiny little channel all the way along
there you can see it there and i had to open that all up i went in fin by fin
and teased out all these little particles of what looks like contact cement and uh
like a crazy glue it's almost like someone tried to
glue the nib and the feed together and put it inside the barrel inside the section
the section i've cleaned out as well it had some residue in it and i've
polished up this nib really nicely and so i'm going to put this all back together again
and put it back in the section ink up the pen and see whether we can get it to write better
than it was i tried the pen after doing that video and cleaning the blue gunk out of the feed but the
pen even though it was better than before still didn't flow the way it should so i soaked it again
and then scored down the top center channel of the feed with my x-acto blade because under the loop
i could see that the channel was blocked as well and they also found that the nib was riding up
on the feed so there's this gap here uh in this photograph i've sort of exaggerated the
nib above the feed but it was not touching the feed at the end of the nib there so i
pressed it down a little bit to bend that nib so that the nib and the feed were touching
all the way down and i made another change as well i changed from parker ink which is very dry to an
ink with a good wet flow pilots arose zuku asagawa and i replaced the cartridge that i was syringe
filling with a chinese knockoff lamy converter it fits the nozzle on the parker perfectly so
let's see how this pen writes now and here we are with the parker centennial do a fold again 1988
parker
dualfold
centennial
and it has an 18 karat gold
medium metallic nib so this is compared to the last time
a lot wetter and this skip here has to do with this being a curse of italic
because it writes very thin in the horizontal very thick in the vertical but it is a fairly
sharp italic and so if you don't hold the pen correctly on your angle so if you turn your wrist
while you're writing with the italic you'll get very thin strokes with no ink on them
so the line variation you get out of this pen without any pressure at all
is really marvelous but you have to hold your angle correctly
and there is a good deal of bounce to this pen as well
as you can see you can really get the ink flowing now
i've also found that a lower a lower angle to the page
is better with this nib as well so if you keep your pen extended out and your wrist down
you can get a lot of flare this is a marvelous pen now so i'm glad i got out all of the gunk
and the pen is writing beautifully now and i'll be happy to return it to teresa and i'm sure she'll
be happy with this pen as well and there you have it if you like this video please like and
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and that's all she wrote
i made this