Not Entirely Cricket

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Rob Bader had a bag lot of Sheaffer parts listed online, and after I spent too much time thinking about it I ended up buying them just so I would quit thinking about them.  It was like bringing home a jigsaw puzzle, spreading things out on the kitchen table for an afternoon to complete some pencils I’ve had laying around.  

I was mostly interested in some of the brightly colored barrels for the lower-priced Cadet lines.  I’ve got lots of Sheaffer mechanisms laying around, and I thought it would be fun to make something out of them.  By the time I was finished, I’d put together around ten pencils – nothing noteworthy, just fun.  I didn’t even take pictures of what came out of the exercise, although I do remember that a couple of these came out of it:

I wasn’t expecting something like this to be in there:

This is the top half of a Sheaffer “Cadet Utility,” in official Sheafferese.  If the clip were gold filled, it would be referred to as a “Sovereign Utility,” “Admiral Utility” or “Craftsman Utility,” depending on which pen was sold with it.  If the cap was fitted with a wide (1/4" or so) gold band, it would be from a “Statesman Utility.”

These exposed-eraser, striated celluloid Sheaffers are really tough to find.  A while back I went through and reshot all of my post-War Sheaffer pencils and posted a backchannel article here just for myself called “Maybe I Won’t Buy Duplicates Now” in the hopes I would quit buying pencils I already have.  Here’s the shot of the exposed-eraser pencils I’ve found:

Note that all but the Statesman Utility have bead bands.  The grey pearl example made news here back in 2014 (Volume 3, page 79), and the black one found its way to me at some point since.  But . . . carmine?   Only a roseglow example would excite me more to find!

Since I had bought the entire parts lot to put things together anyway, I thought I would have no trouble building an entire pencil around this cap – after all, the exposed eraser is the tough part, I reasoned.  However, I immediately ran into problems:

I found two possible donors, but neither is quite what I have in mind.  Both have gold trim, for starters - and that beadband is an integral part of the lower barrel, so there’s no swapping over a chrome-plated bead band.  Then there’s the lower barrels themselves:

The Cadet Utility has a lower barrel that is longer than any of Sheaffer’s regular line pencils . . . and it is ribbed (at least on the Cadet series; on the Statesmans, some are and some are not).  

After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I used the one without the bead band as a temporary cap-holder.  At least that way, it just looks a little shorter, and only the wrong colored tip looks out of place.

I didn’t swap out the tip for now, because I’m telling myself this is just a temporary fix, so I can display a carmine Cadet Utility in my collection.  When the correct lower half of one of these surfaces, I tell myself, I’ll return the original cap to the pencil and all will be completely cricket.

Like that will ever happen.