New Pen Day: Sheaffer Snorkel
It's dangerous to be part of the Pen Addict Slack, as there is a very active sell-trade channel. 😅 I saw someone selling a Sheaffer Snorkel fountain pen for $40 shipped and jumped on it, since it was such a great price, and I wanted to see what all the fuss about these Snorkel pens was all about. It is my first Sheaffer pen! It arrived on Monday in pretty decent condition for a pen that's around 74 years old. The body has lots of microscratches and marks from being capped, but nothing that bothered me. Again, it's in great shape for a used pen of its age.
The idea behind the Sheaffer Snorkel is that a tube extends from the feed beyond the tip of the nib so that you can ink the pen without getting ink all over the nib and possibly the pen body. Already it felt super gadgety to me, which is totally my jam. 😀 I watched a couple YouTube videos (1, 2) on the pen and how the filling mechanism worked before I tried to ink it.
At first I was going to fill it with the remainder of my sample of Diamine Autumn Oak since it's a pretty fall color, but I accidentally knocked over the sample vial while trying to get the snorkel down to the ink level. 🤦♀️ Luckily it was an easy clean up since it wasn't a full sample, no harm, no foul.
I then decided on Herbin Lie de Thé and tried to fill it from an ink miser with an eyedropper-full of ink, but I wasn't sure if the ink was actually getting sucked into the pen because the act of pushing in the filler seemed to be emptying the ink back into the miser. :head scratching: I closed the pen up anyway and tried to write with it but the ink wasn't flowing that well, and the pen wrote pretty scratchily. At this point I was concerned the filling mechanism wasn't working, but I cleaned out the pen and tried a third ink, The Wet Pen's Blackberry.
All of my inks from The Wet Pen are very wet (duh), so I thought that if the pen is a dry writer, which it seemed when I tested with the Herbin ink, maybe this very wet ink can balance everything out. I filled directly from the ink bottle and only did the procedure once, hoping the pen filled correctly. I started writing on some Kokuyo Business paper and it appeared to work just fine. Phew! I also noticed that the fine nib seemed to have an architect nib quality to it, where the downstrokes were ever-so-slightly thinner than the cross strokes. Awesome, I love architect nibs!
The nib is actually out of alignment. However, it seems to work fine, so I'll leave it for now. Ha, this may be why the nib has the architect-like performance! 😆 If anyone knows of a nibmeister who can tune these older tubular Sheaffer nibs, I'd be interested to have the information for reference.
I love the tubular/conical nib. Very cool looking. I know it's not the same as the Schon Design Monoc nib, but I'm liking the similarities (and the price!).
I will talk about the Blackberry ink tomorrow, for Ink Swatch Wednesday. For now, I'll say that this Snorkel pen has got me wanting to add more Snorkels and more Sheaffer pens to my collection. Oh no... 😅