Month: May 2022

Early thoughts on the Geha 715 fountain pen.

~ rupertarzeian ~ 4 Comments

Recently I was the happy recipient of another unexpected gift of pens, from my friend in Melbourne. As you can imagine, for a fountain pen enthusiast, it is exciting to receive such a package and to discover its contents.

One of them was this Geha 715, a vintage German piston-filler dating from around the 1960’s. My friend had bought it on ebay.

Geha 715 fountain pen.

This name was new to me. I have since read that Geha was founded in 1918 by two brothers, Heinrich and Conrad Hartmann. The name was a contraction of Gebruder-Hartmann, – Hartmann Brothers. Based in Hannover, the firm initially dealt in stationery and office supplies and began making pens in 1950. They made fountain pens for the student market until ultimately the company was bought by Pelikan in around 1990.

This particular model, the 715, is in a classic black resin with gold coloured trim. The model name Geha 715 is engraved in the side of the cap. The cap finial is a plain gold-coloured flat disc. There is a functional gold coloured pocket clip and a single cap-ring engraved with “Geha, Made in Germany, Rolled gold.”

Rolled Gold cap ring.

The cap unscrews, in one full turn. This reveals a gold coloured, semi-hooded nib. To my delight, this one has an Oblique Broad nib. My friend sent it to me, knowing of my liking for such nibs.

Geha 715 engraved on the cap.

There is an ink window in blue plastic. The barrel then tapers gracefully up to the piston turning knob and another gold coloured disc at the base.

The pen is on the slim side, but comfortable to hold and can be used with or without the cap being posted. Unposted, it is already 123mm long, but the cap posts deeply and firmly to increase the length to about 147mm, which feels very comfortable.

I flushed the pen, and tried the piston. It felt a bit stiff to lower the plunger, but smooth and easy when raising the plunger again.

The nib looks like gold, but my friend tells me it is steel. There are no visible markings on the exposed part of the nib. I presume that both nib and cap ring are plated in rolled gold. The nib shows no sign of any rust or staining, although a slight kink just behind the tipping suggests that the pen may have been dropped at some point and the nib straightened out again.

I inked it up with Waterman Absolute Brown ink. Initially the pen wrote rather dry and pale and needed pressure on the nib to keep ink flowing. I decided to try flossing the tines. I then tried widening the tine gap just marginally by bending the tip upwards, before trying again to widen the tine gap by means of inserting the blade of a craft knife in the gap and wriggling it very gently from side to side, until the pen wrote smoothly and with only minimal downward pressure.

Trying the Oblique Broad nib with some Waterman Absolute Brown.

Looking online, I found some Youtube videos on other Geha models, by The Pen Collector. I also learned that the Geha pens had a special feature – an ink reserve, which could be released by pressing a button on the underside of the feed. On some pens, this was a small round button, but on the 715, there is a shiny rod like the hull of a boat, which can be slid inwards towards the section.

The button to release the ink reserve

Having succeeded in sliding the button in, I then had an anxious few minutes worrying how to slide it back again. However it transpires that the button resets itself when the piston is next lowered. As you turn the piston knob to lower the piston down before re-filling, the piston can be lowered further, pushing against some resistance, to push the ink reserve tube back down into the section again.

It is arguable whether an ink reserve is necessary when you have a piston filler with an ink window. It seems to have been a gimmick. But I admit that I would have loved this as a school boy, like having a secret gadget in your pencil case. The idea was that if you were taken by surprise at running out of ink in your main tank, you could activate the reserve, releasing enough ink for another two or three pages of writing, which might get you to the end of your exam without having to re-fill! No doubt my 1960’s self would have pushed the ink reserve button in with my finger nail, getting inky fingers in the process, but I have just read in another Geha review, that the instruction manual suggested using your pen cap for this task. Of course.

Size comparison: from left to right – Montblanc 12, Montblanc 34 and Geha 715

All in all, it is a gorgeous pen. Although produced as a school pen, the black resin body remains just as smart and glossy as on my Montblancs of this era. It is nice to think that it may have belonged to a school boy, or girl, in 1960’s Germany and I wonder at the pen’s unknown history before it found me.

Update: 21 May 2022

Following a suggestion by Gasquolet in the comments to the above post, I learned that the section unscrews, just before the cap threads. This exposed a rather delicate looking feed, protruding from the section, with a small collar piece at the top. I lifted off the collar, pushed the delicate feed channel out through the front, and was then able to pull the nib out. Sure enough the nib is gold. It is clearly marked Geha 14k 585, but you do not see any markings when the nib is in situ.

Disassembling.

I took the opportunity to do a little more flossing of the nib with a fine brass shim, before putting everything back together. Some care is needed to re-align the tines, after pushing the nib back into the section.

Geha 14k gold nib. This one is an oblique broad although not marked as such.

I also applied a little grease to the threads for the section. This might have been the first time that the section had ever been unscrewed and the nib removed in the pen’s 60 year life, for all I know.

Nib extracted from the grip section.

I refilled the pen with Pelikan Edelstein Smoky Quartz and tried some writing samples.

Writing samples. The nib needs a little pressure and is clearly wetter when in underwriting mode.

Hardstarting. Evaporation or gravity?

~ rupertarzeian ~ 10 Comments

Over the last couple of months I have been much enjoying the Delike New Moon fude nib fountain pen. I am on my second, after giving the first one away.

The fine fude nib on the Delike New Moon.

The main reason why I enjoy this inexpensive pen so much, comes down to writing pleasure from the nib and the way it compliments my handwriting. The fine fude stainless steel nib, (with its upturned tip), writes very smoothly and provides some subtle line width variation in my usual style (whether underwriting or overwriting). Also it has the versatility of providing several different line widths when required, simply by changing the way I hold the pen.

Looking back over the pages of my notebooks for the past few weeks, where I often write a few lines of nonsense just for the pleasure of putting pen to paper from any of the dozen or so currently inked pens in the pen cups, I noticed that the Delike had produced a more interesting line: my handwriting seemed to look more attractive from this pen, than from many others.

My writing looking neater and more legible than usual.

Nothing is ever perfect. Recently I noticed that my Delike had taken to hardstarting: not writing immediately when I picked up the pen after an interval of a few hours. I keep my currently inked pens upright in pen cups and write something with most of them fairly frequently. But I started to notice that if the Delike was left overnight in the pen cup, it might hesitate to start the next day. The nib would be dry. I might get a word or two out of it, but some letters would be incomplete (skipping) and then the nib would run dry completely. I would hold the pen nib down and give it a few shakes. After a few bouts of shaking, ink would flow, dark and wet again, and the nib would feel super-smooth and lubricated. I would be cooking on gas and all would be forgiven and forgotten.

This was not due to ink starvation, which is sometimes caused by surface tension causing ink to remain at the back end of the cartridge or converter, when it should flow to the nib. The Delike’s converter includes a little coil of metal as an ink agitator which slides up and down to combat that.

At first I thought that the problem was one of ink evaporation. This can occur when the cap does not create an airtight seal around the nib. Some pens are brilliant at avoiding this, such as some Platinums with their slip and seal sprung inner caps, or the Esterbrook Estie which also has a sprung inner cap. My Aurora 88 and Aurora Optima both have ebonite feeds which, together with well designed caps, mean hard starts do not happen.

To see if your cap is airtight, a crude test is to place your mouth over the rim and try to blow: if air escapes it is not airtight. If your cheeks puff out and nothing happens, then it is. The Delike cap passed this test.

This led me to think that the hardstarting may not be due to ink evaporation but instead have another cause, that the ink drained away from the nib and/or feed overnight, back into the cartridge or converter. This would simply be due to gravity, whilst the pen is left upright in the pen cup. If that is the cause, then an easy solution is not to stand the pen in a pen cup but leave it horizontal.

This week I have been testing my theory on the Delike. Does this work? It is early days but I am cautiously optimistic that the problem may have been solved. I have not been very (or at all) scientific in my method. I have only one Delike New Moon pen, not a whole bunch of them to put into two groups, to leave some horizontal while another, control group stays upright. I also try only one ink at a time. Temperatures may make a big difference if evaporation is at play. However, I shall continue to monitor how this goes.

As for inks tried, I am on my seventh, having inked my first New Moon with Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo, Pelikan Edelstein Smoky Quartz, Montlanc Toffee Brown, and Parker Quink Blue Black: my second New Moon has had Waterman Serenity Blue, Robert Oster Aqua and currently Montlanc William Shakespeare Velvet Red. A fill with the gorgeous Velvet Red is a luxury usually only afforded to my Montblanc Classique and so I hope that the pen behaves itself. So far so good.

With Montblanc William Shakespeare Velvet Red, on Semikolon journal paper.