A bird of a different feather - a Pelikan with new

[jtate]

Pelikan fountain pens are recognized as amongst the nicest pens ever made. I personally use them on a daily basis. Their barrels, however, are dull green strips. Seen one, seen 'em all. So I started mimicing Chris Burton who does custom work on Pelikans. He removes the exterior skin (called a 'binde') and fabricates a new binde for the pen from any number of materials - acrylic, celluloid, black hard rubber, red hard rubber, mottled hard rubber. My first few efforts were not so great as I didn't have my technique down. This one, however is pretty nice.

Blue acrylic over the original inner tube of the vintage Pelikan 140 fountain pen.

Please forgive the poor image quality. I was just so pleased with the pen I wanted to share so I just put it on the office scanner and made an image.

 

[JimGo]

Beautiful pen!

 

[thewishman]

Looks like a classy restoration - nice work.

 

[Glenn McCullough]

oooh! nicely done. how hard are they to disassemble and rebuild?

 

[ken69912001]

Thats nice.Good pic for being scanned.

 

[jtate]

They're really challenging to disassemble and the ones I use run around $50-60 on eBay auctions so it's kind of expensive to mess up. It's inevitable that a few of the barrels break in the process of remocing the old binde. I'm getting better but I don't think I'll ever totally master that part. Probably, it's because the material being worked is fifty years old or better.
That and the removal of the filling mechanism from the back end is always chancey. It may have adhered to the inside of the barrel and those it breaks when it's under pressure or I may exert too much pressure and break it in that manner. Mostly it's my own lack of patience, however, that breaks those. I just don't work slowly and gently enough.

Thanks for the kind comments!

Julia

 

[gerryr]

Very nice work.

 

[Jim15]

Excellent pen.