Editing The Pen Addict 50/transcript (section)

== Parker Vacumatic ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' The Silver Pearl. Silver Pearl. Yep. So it's the Vacumatic Silver Pearl. I did determine that it's a third-generation Silver Pearl. There's some sites you can kind of check. I don't know exactly what year it was made, but it's definitely a third-generation, which is like 1942-ish, something like that. So, yes, I will do a full review on this pen as I do my research. I need to do some more research and put the history together to do a good post. But it's a fascinating, fascinating and completely beautiful pen. So I'm really, really happy with this pen.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm going to put a bid in on one.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I mean, they're not ridiculously expensive, you know. I think I paid $125 for mine.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' They're on eBay for – there was one that went for like $115 yesterday. There's some that are going for like $60 or $70. You know, I don't know all the differences between them.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I mean, this one that I'm looking at is $58 at the moment with seven bids. So it's probably going to go up quite a lot. And it's restored.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Yeah, that was the thing. The guy that I bought this from actually does all the restoration work. So I knew – I didn't want to buy it from anyone just right off their table, not knowing if it would work or not. This guy actually restores these pens, and he was actually restoring some of them sitting there at the table. So I felt comfortable buying it from him that I'm going to get this pen, and it's going to be in good working order. So that's a key with buying an 80-year-old pen or more in this case. So that was an off-the-list purchase that ended up being just something that I could not pass up. Kind of same with the Pearl. I mean, it was just kind of like the design spoke to me. The feel spoke to me. And the beauty of it is just it was hard to pass up. So, yeah. So by that time, I'm three pens into it, and the budget's hurting pretty bad. And I haven't even sat with Myke Masayama yet to get my nibs worked on. So I finally went over there. It was about 2 o'clock, and my time was ready to sit with Myke. And I sat and talked with him, and I said, you know, my friend Thomas gets all his pens from him. He's like, oh, you're that blogger guy.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Oh, see? I knew people would know who you were.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And we just started laughing. He just started laughing. He's like, yeah, Thomas gets a lot of his pens done. So we had a – you know, I sat with Masayama for probably close to 45 minutes, if not an hour, and talked with him and his wife while he worked on my pens. We talked about – so let's talk about the pens that I got done by him. So I had two that I planned on getting done. One was the Lamy 2000.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Two was the old-school pilot vanishing point, the faceted model. Those were the ones I brought with me specifically for him to work. And then I ended up – when I got the pearl, I knew that Thomas had had his pearl done by Masayama. So I asked – he couldn't – Masayama couldn't do like eight pens. He just – he'd be there all day. So I asked him if he could do a third, and he was nice enough to do a third one for me. So he did the pearl. So let's take these one by one. So my Lamy 2000, ever since I bought it, I felt the nib has been a little bit off. Like I'd have some skipping, and I just – it wasn't a consistent writer. So I'd always wanted to get the nib looked at, and we – you and I have talked about this on several shows before. So that's the first pen I hand him. He pulls out his loop and looks at the nib. And he goes – like within five seconds, he's like, oh, yeah, I see a problem here.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Wow. So one of the tines, like on one side of the line, you know, the slit in between the nib, one side of it was longer than the other side.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Okay.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So that would cause inconsistency in one direction of my writing, which is exactly the problem I was having. Like say if the right tine was longer, okay, and I'm writing to the left, I have a good line. But if I write back to the right, that longer tine is getting in the way.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Wow.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I'm having some skipping that direction. So we talked about that, and then we talked about the fact that I wanted to take this EF nib and make it even finer. So he smoothed it out, made it even, and then sharpened it to probably like an extra, extra fine.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And it immediately turned it into a pen, into one of my favorite pens. Because I'm going to have to, I've never reviewed this pen because I've always had, I always wanted to get the nib looked at first, right? Because I didn't think I was doing it justice because I love the pen. This is a really hard pen to put down for me. It's very well made. I like using it. I use it at work a lot.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And now that I've got this nib adjusted, I'm going to review it, and it's going to, it's going to rank very highly. Let's just say that. And the nib, I don't think you have a Lamy EF nib, but you know, they're fine, but they're not like micro fine. And now it's like a, it's like a Japanese fine nib now on my Lamy 2000, and I love it. This is going to be one of my favorite pens.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So the second one I got done was the vanishing point. And you, you have a vanishing point and you know that the nib unit comes out of there, right? The little, you, you unscrew the pen and the little nib unit comes out. So I just gave him the nib unit. I had the pen with me, but I just gave him the nib unit. And I told him this is a medium nib. It's a 14 karat gold medium nib. And I told him I wanted it like a flat stub italic, something like that, you know? So we talked about, you know, what I really wanted. And he just went over a few things and he said, this is what I can do. And he put, he basically put a stub nib on my medium, medium nib vanishing point. And when he finished it, well, or he got, what he does is he, he grinds and grinds and grinds for maybe like, I don't know, 10 minutes. He works on the pen. Then he, he tests it out himself, dips it in ink, tests it out, smooths it out some more, tests it out some more, smooths it out and kind of gets it down. Then he hands the pen to you. All right. And then you, you, so like when he handed me the 2000 back immediately, it was perfect. You know, he wrote with it. I could tell he was happy with it. He handed it to me. I wrote with it. I was happy with it. We're done. All right. So now he's on the vanishing point and he's just got the nib section and he's working on it and he finishes working on it and he starts dipping it and then smooth it in on the little sandpaper. And he's going back and forth and I can see in his face, he's not real thrilled with it. And he hands it to me. He goes, try this. And I put it to the paper and I goes, it's kind of scratchy. He goes, yeah, I thought so too. He said, give it back to me. So I give it back to him.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Did you feel bad saying that?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' No, no, not at all. No, because I saw the look in his face. You know how you can kind of tell he kind of, kind of, you know, his eyes kind of looked at it funny. Like he wasn't too comfortable with this. He just wanted to see what I thought.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And then, and then I said it and he said, yeah, I thought the same thing too. He said, give it back to me. So I gave it back to him and he's like, he was kind of dumbfounded for a second. He's like, oh, do you have the, do you have the barrel? I said, yeah, it's right here. He said, give me the barrel. So he puts it in the barrel and he goes, oh, okay. So he said, here's the deal. When we're, you and I were just using the metal nib section, we're not, the feedback, just the metal feel, the vibration isn't getting passed through the barrel of the pen.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's ridiculous. This guy's a wizard. What the hell?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay. So I said, oh God, that makes complete sense. It actually makes complete logical sense, but I would have never thought about it. He's like, yeah, this nib is scratchy. Well, it wasn't scratchy. It was that we were not getting any buffer when we were writing. So it was more a vibration. It wasn't the nib was scratchy. It's that we were holding metal on metal and we were getting a vibration. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You could feel the fibers of the paper. That's the difference.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. So he just puts the nib unit in the pen, didn't make any more adjustments to the nib and it's smooth as silk. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because obviously he knew what he was doing. That's probably why he was confused. He's like, I've done this right. What's wrong with this?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's exactly right. You could tell he was like, oh yeah. So yeah, as soon as we put it back in the pen barrel, it was a completely different pen. So that, I mean, yeah, the things you learn just from sitting with this guy for a few minutes is like, is, you know, so far in the Lamy 2000, I learned about the nib being too long on one side. And the vanishing point, I learned that if you're going to test out the nib unit, you better have it in the pen or it's going to feel completely differently. So it was pretty crazy. So those two pens I'm thrilled with. I would definitely do, I've never done a review of the faceted vanishing point either. And now that it's got this really cool nib on it, I write really awesome, awesome with it. So the third pen I got was the pearl that we talked about earlier. It had a standard steel fine nib on it, just from the Edison nib. And I knew Thomas had some Edison nibs ground into, he calls it a 0.2 millimeter Japanese extra fine. So I told Masuyama that I wanted the Thomas Hall special. And he just laughed and he thought that was funny. He's like, oh, Thomas likes it very, very fine. He said, you like that too? I said, yeah. I said, I've borrowed a bunch of his pens and that's exactly what I like. So he took this, he took the pearl. This was the easiest one yet. So he just took that one, ground it down to a 0.2 millimeter Japanese extra fine. And I'm thrilled with it. I use it all night at work last night and it works like a charm. So that one was real straightforward grind. That one didn't take him very long to do it all. And it came out perfectly. So I was very happy. And just so people kind of get an idea of cost of something like that, he charged me $30 per pen, which I thought was completely fair. So it was $90 to get all those pens done, $30 per. So just so you have a baseline.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's incredible.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So that was fun. So now I'm going to, I mean, I've got a couple more. I already want to send him, you know, I can, you can mail it to him. He'll do them, send them back and send you an invoice and you pay him. So a real nice guy and a very enjoyable and very, very good experience that I learned a lot from that experience. So, so by that time I'm pretty worn out. It's about three o'clock or even, it might even be later. It was probably around three. So I get done with him. I haven't eaten lunch yet. I'm tired. I've got a headache. I go get a Coke. And I was like, all right, I've been around this show three or four times now. And I saw a pen earlier that I've already found three or four times. Let me go back and look at it one more time and see if I want to buy it. And that pen is the Pelican M405. Now I just reviewed that, what, a week, maybe two weeks ago on the blog. It was one that I had borrowed from Thomas and it was the same model, the M405. And I'd never used a Pelican before. And when I reviewed it, it kind of knocked my socks off. I was very impressed with the pen. So I knew I'd be able to find some Pelicans there. But I, there was actually, I, I didn't, there were a few vintage Pelicans because they've been around forever. Um, people had a lot of vintage Pelicans, but, um, Richard Bender from, uh, Richard's Pens. Yeah. I think they're out of New York. Um, they were there and they're, they're a very large retailer. They have lots of brands and they actually carry the full, they're a Pelican vendor. They had the full Pelican line from like the lowest end model up to, you know, the thousand dollar Pelicans there on display. Um, so I was like, oh, this is going to be a problem. Cause I knew I was going to come up with one because they had them all there. I could test them all out and all the nibs, everything. And the one I'd used from Thomas was an M405. And the way Pelicans are, when you talk about their numbering system, the lower the number, the smaller, the size, the overall size of the pen is. So like there's an M205 or M M200 series is a little bit smaller than the M400. And the M400 is a little bit smaller than the M600. And I'm talking about, you know, overall size of the pen and then size of the nib. And it goes up to an M1000. And the M1000s are huge. It's just, I can never use a pen that large and that heavy. And the M800s are large and heavy too. So I like the 400. It's a small, on the smaller side, but it's just like the perfect weight, the perfect balance, the perfect feel. And they had the black with the rhodium trim, which is the one, exact one I tested out and reviewed. And then they had, they actually had all the colors. But the only two that came in the rhodium trim are the black, solid black, and then this blue striated model. It's like vertical stripes on the pen. And I was dead set on buying the black one just because it's like every other black pen I own, right? It's black with a silver trim. And it's got this very cool, like little green ink window that's, you can't, you can only see if you hold it at the right angle. So that was a huge selling point for me. But I kept coming back to this blue pen and it looks so pretty. And I said, you know what? Just grow a pair and buy something different for a change. And so I did. I bought the blue one and I could not be more happy with that choice of barrel. It is beautiful, beautiful looking pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Again, this is one where the pictures don't really do it justice. And the nib is like a two-tone silver and gold. It's 14 karat gold nib. I got an extra fine. This one's going to Masayama pretty quickly. Because the extra fine here is really, really wide.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Which is fine. I mean, I like it. It might be the smoothest writing nib I own.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You know, Richard Bender is famous for his, for adjusting the nibs. When you buy the pen from him, his wife was manning the table and a couple other people were manning their tables. You purchase a pen from him and then it goes straight to him sitting over and working and smoothing out the nibs. And he basically does a once-over on the pen for you right there. Smooths the nib, grinds it, makes sure it's absolutely perfect. So it's like this silky smooth. Might be the smoothest nib I own. But I think I'm going to have to get it adjusted to get it finer. It certainly doesn't need to be any smoother because it's an amazing writer.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I love the cap.