One Less Pen

I have a project that may have just cost me my favorite pen. I’m exag­ger­at­ing. A lit­tle. It’s not quite over yet, and I knew the Rotring 700 was not going to sur­vive this process. I knew there was some risk involved, and I may yet find a solution.

The prob­lem is that my Rotring 700 had seen bet­ter days. The bar­rel had been dent­ed, the cap no longer fit secure­ly over the nib, the cap also would not post secure­ly. For some pens that’s not such a big deal, for a foun­tain pen, hav­ing a cap fall off when you don’t expect it to has poten­tial­ly seri­ous con­se­quences. Sad­ly, the days of this 700 were numbered.

I pur­chased a cou­ple of Rotring 600s. These are heav­ier pens with a nib that isn’t as good as the 700’s. I bought two with this project in mind: I’d keep one Rotring 600 as a 600, but trans­plant the nib of the 700 onto the oth­er. The nibs were not easy to remove, but they were not impos­si­ble either. The prob­lem I encoun­tered is that the nibs have a dif­fer­ent cur­va­ture to them. Just fix­ing the nib of the 700 to the feed and sec­tion of the 600 does­n’t real­ly do the job. The (small­er diam­e­ter) nib rides high on top of the (larg­er diam­e­ter) feed. The ink actu­al­ly will flow through, but not well, not con­sis­tent­ly and not for long. So my next thought was that I should remove the feed from the 700’s sec­tion and replace the 600’s feed with it. Then the feed would match to the nib, they’d sit togeth­er well and the ink would flow. Right?

Per­haps. That’s still untest­ed. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, while try­ing to remove the feed, I broke the part of the feed that runs under the nib clean off. So now I’m in search of plan B. One pos­si­bil­i­ty is to take the too-large 600 feed and attempt to shave a few tenths of a mil­lime­ter off of each side, mak­ing a snug­ger fit. I’m not real­ly sure what the oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties are, but I’m hes­i­tant to try that one because it seems real­ly easy to get wrong and impos­si­ble to put back the way it was.

I can say this much: the 700 nib on the body of a 600 looks great. It real­ly lends some ele­gance to the blocky appear­ance of the 600. There’s a lot to be said for the lines of the 600, but I believe the nib of the 700 com­pli­ments those lines bet­ter than the orig­i­nal’s. I’m not will­ing to call this a failed exper­i­ment yet, but I may nev­er write with a Rotring 700 again.