Abnormal and Abnormal's Next of Kin

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My friend Warren Granek called me a few months ago with a favor to ask: could I fix a Parker Streamline Duofold pencil for a client of his?

Sigh.  I don’t like working on Parkers.  To do it right usually requires soldering, which is kind of a pain in the neck, when most other pencils usually require nothing more than a paper clip and a rubber band to get back on the road.  But Warren has been a friend for years, and he wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important, so I agreed.  What the heck, I thought – I’ve got enough damaged Parkers laying about that I can probably just swap out the mechanism for him.

The pencil arrived, and one look told me this was probably going to be tougher than I thought:

If it’s tough to see what I’m talking about, let me show it to you alongside a “normal” Streamline Duofold:

The typical Duofold has a much more substantial nose and lower barrel, while this one has a more tapered barrel with a smaller nose.  Note that the nose is smooth too - it doesn’t have that typical Parker ring of dimples encircling it.  What’s more, the top is narrower too, and instead of the venerable “Pat. Sep. 5 16" washer clip, this one has the plain “Parker” clip similar to Parker’s Depression (or Thrift, or Moderne, depending on your preference of terminology).

Both sport Duofold imprints, although the imprint on the weirdo is on the lower barrel and more closely resembles the early Vacumatic imprints:

There’s only one other place I’ve seen these features, and going down the checklist, it has every single one of them.  It came up here in the course of that Vacumatic article.  Remember Eric Magnuson’s pride and joy?

Eric’s weird Parker has that same profile.  So I wondered: how do the insides of normal Duofolds compare to what’s inside these?

On a typical Duofold, the mechanism unscrews from the lower barrel and resembles the earlier bell-top Duofold pencils on which it was based.  The oddball, however, doesn’t want to come apart (and since I only know of two examples, I’m not going to push the issue further than what you see here).  That section of tube fits snugly down between the mechanism and the lower barrel and provides the friction which holds the top half of the barrel in place.

While I suspect the ribs at the top of the mechanism were meant to engage grooves inside the top of the barrel, this one is a little tired and doesn’t want to positively engage to drive the lead forward.

I didn’t pull Eric’s example apart when I photographed it, so I asked him to take a peek under the hood to see what was going on.  My weird Duofold’s nearest living relative is almost identical, but not completely;

Eric’s example is more exotic on the outside than mine, but less so on the inside, more closely matching regular production Duofolds.