Brian Beat Me to the Punch

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Several of the pictures I’m about to show you are a few years old.  A few others are from 2016, right after the Ohio Show and a fiasco over trying to find parts to fix a Parker Vacumatic pencil for Greg Proctor.  In the end, I never did anything with them.  Why?  My good friend and Vacumatic maven Brian McQueen posted a more thorough examination of the innards of Vac pencils, and it seemed redundant.

Now, some four years later, I figure I might as well throw my two cents’ in.

Parker Vacumatics are interesting because they straddle two of the three great epochs of Parker pencil development.  Those three are:

First Epoch: “Ignore them, they’ll go away.”  Parker, along with Waterman, disdained pencils – although Parker was a little less aggressive towards them. (One Waterman publication said that writing with a pencil only ruins one’s handwriting!)  Even with the introduction of the Eversharp in 1913 followed by Sheaffer’s introduction of the Sharp-Point in 1917, and the skyrocketing fortunes of both firms due in large part to offering companion pencils to match their pens, Parker went to its happy place and blissfully made nothing but what it was used to making.

Second Epoch: “Oh crap, we’d better get serious about this.”  In late 1921, Parker announced plans to introduce an original pencil of its own, but only after it was beginning to lose market share to pen companies that were offering pencils.  The “Non-Clog” pencil (later renamed the “Lucky Lock,” for the way the cap locked onto the barrel) came out in 1922, and Parker was playing catchup in pencil engineering trying to come up with something that was as reliable as what experienced pencil companies were making.  Most of the company’s ideas during this era were bad ones, but they are interesting to collectors today.

Third Epoch: “Screw it, as long as it looks like the pens on the outside, who cares?”  Beginning in the 1930s, Parker began outsourcing production of pencil mechanisms to Cross.  It’s no coincidence that the reliability of Parker pencils improved significantly around that time, but as far as variety goes . . . well, it’s darn near the same thing inside most Parkers from the mid-1930s on, dressed up on the outside with different-looking bits of plastic and metal.

Note:  no, Liquid Lead pencils don’t count as a deviation from the third epoch . . . those were just ballpoint pens that were supposed to use graphite paste instead of ink.

Here’s what the insides of Parker Vacumatics look like after the “Screw it” era began:

You’ll only see the spiral inside that chrome tube if something has gone wrong inside, as was the case with this one  – normally, these are pretty robust mechanisms, so you won’t get that chrome outer shell off to peek inside.

Before Parker went with these, the beginning of the Vacumatic era, from 1933 until about 1935, was the zenith of Parker’s attempts to come up with something that worked better than what other companies had been doing for a decade or two.  The high water mark, I believe, was those weird Autopoint-like prototypes I wrote about here back in 2014 (now in print, at The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 3, page 8):

Outside of esoteric shop pieces like these, though, there’s plenty of variety in Vac mechanisms before the company gave up and let someone else make them.  From what I recall, it was 2016 at the Ohio Show when  my challenge was to find a replacement mechanism for a pencil like this for Greg Proctor:

With the cap removed, you’ll see something typical on earlier Vacumatic pencils - a two stage top, where the topmost portion is the part that rotates to advance the lead, and the lower part acts to provide additional friction to hold the cap in place:

From what I recall, I saw Greg on Thursday, and he was hoping I’d be able to repair this early Vacumatic – I can tell it’s early because the nose is longer.  Since I commute back and forth Thursday and sometimes Fridays to the Ohio Show, I agreed to take it home because I knew I had one laying around that might be a suitable donor. 

Note: Vacs are generally plentiful enough that it’s usually easier to swap a mechanism out of a donor than it is to repair them.

Today was not Greg’s day though . . . the pencil I was thinking of turned out to be something quite different on the inside, although it looked almost identical on the outside:

By the way, Greg's did have three bands - there's a groove on the lower barrel for the third band which has gone missing.  Greg’s pencil is a rear-drive pencil, meaning that turning the cap at the rear of the pencil advances the lead.  The one I was thinking of using as a donor looks exactly the same on the outside, but it has a simple nose drive mechanism.  The screw-in top section’s only function is to hold the top half of the barrel on.

Huh.

So I started going through my other earlier Vacumatics, hoping I could find something that works, and from this small sampling I was noticing a trend:

The top halves all work the same, but you’ll notice that most of the time, the nose is much shorter like you’ll see in bottom example.  That reflects the fact that the insides are not interchangeable – the barrel opening was too narrow inside.

And there’s something else: most of the time there’s three bands, all on the top section, but every so often you’ll find one of the three bands on the lower section (these pictures are really old):

I didn’t have the right mechanism to spare for Greg, but he did get something else out of the deal.  I’d mentioned here that I had inadvertently outbid a friend for a Vacumatic Senior pencil I’d won in an online auction (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/11/one-out-of-three.html) – I didn’t mention who it was for some reason, but Greg was happy to add it to the series he was working on.  I also mentioned that he had let me photograph his other two examples as part of the deal, but since that image was still in my unpublished pictures folder, I don’t think I ever got around to showing it here:

Those slightly wider middle bands are what identifies these as Vacumatic Seniors.  Then, of course, there’s Eric Magnuson, who spared no expense acquiring this one:

From the days before Parker fully figured out how to get those lines straight, this senior-banded Vacumatic has an old Duofold-style top and washer clip, and the earlier Duofold-style imprint:

It took me forever to find these last few pictures.  When I was editing The Pennant, my friend Tsachi Mitsenmacher brought a few things to the 2016 Chicago Show for me to photograph, and I remembered taking some shots of his Ripley Vacumatics.  Alas, my days at The Pennant were shorter than my photo archive, and none of the pictures ever made it into print.

I looked everywhere on my laptop and my backup drive . . . nothing.  And then I remembered – I replaced my laptop a couple years ago.  Down into the catacombs I went, to turn the crank on the side of old faithful to see what might still be on her, and there it was: “Pennant - Pipeline,” a folder containing nearly 7 gigabytes of material I shot but never had the opportunity to use.  There they were:

Ripley Vacumatics have been the topic of a few articles here over the years, most recently in “The Class of 1939,” exploring among other things those 1939-dated Ripleys that surface from time to time (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-class-of-1939.html?m=0).  Rare they are in red; numbered on maybe one hand are the known examples in grey pearl:

The pen is a nice compliment to this pencil, but it's not a Ripley.  Those narrower stripes, according to Brian McQueen, indicate it's a silvery blue Vacuum Filler pen: