today i had a bunch of great vintage finds i found an old conklin 40, a small BCHR Wear-Ever, and a waterman 13 with perfect color and imprints but no nib. all day i have been ogling the waterman 13. the imprints on it predated the globe logo and the feed predated the spoon feed. the 13 had some old white out or stickers on it that i had to spend the better part of a day peeling off but i was so excited at having found one in the wild for $15. once i got the stickers off and it was all cleaned off the only scratches on the pen were from me gently peeling off the white out with my fingernails.
with great excitement i inserted a 14k warranted nib of the right size and filled it up with ink. i couldn't wait to see how the pen wrote. from past experience with other pens of this age i expected the pen to have bouts of gushing ink and going dry and i told my friend that as well who had been watching me fix up the pen all day. but as i wrote page after page i did not have a single instance of the ink running dry or gushing out. there was a little nib creep but that was it, no drips. sadly the nib had no flex while in the pen. it had a bit of flex when it was loose but once properly fitted to the feed it was fairly stiff. eventually it struck me, the pen wrote and felt exactly like a lamy safari.
this is where i became conflicted, i expect the old waterman to be better and worse than a lamy safari. i would expect the lamy to have better flow control than a pen of this age. even though the flow was way more consistent than any other pen i have from that time the way the pen writes lacks any of the character you would expect from an old pen. other than any historical value of the pen there is really no advantage to this vintage pen. they are both no frills workhorses. the only difference is that the modern pen does it as well for cheaper. at the same time though there is perhaps something to be said for a pen writing so well after over 100 years. i have a hard time imagining that my lamy will be as easy to flush and get started again after laying barren for so long.
