This week I performed my first successful transplant on an elderly tortoise. Or was it a pelikan?

That is to say, I have given my recently acquired and much prized, Pelikan M400 vintage tortoise, a new nib. The one that it arrived with was a Rover, 14k gold, extra fine, which had wonderful flex to it and was great fun to experiment and doodle with. On removing this, the full inscription on the nib could be seen as Rover 585 EXTRA PO.45. I had wrongly assumed that the concealed lettering beneath the “EXTRA” would say “FINE” and had not guessed that it would say PO.45.

I do not have any information on Rover nibs and would be interested to know when and where they were made. I believe my pen dates from the early 1950’s and it has not yet yielded up all its secrets, nor is it likely to. It would be fascinating to know who had owned it and where it has been all my life. All I know is that it arrived at Hampstead Auctions, had been well cared for and had vestiges of a blue ink from its last use.

Much as I enjoyed this nib, it was not well suited to my way of writing. I found that I could write in an upright hand, quite smoothly, but if writing in my more usual slanting style and with any speed, the soft extra fine nib was rather scratchy. Not a pen to be rushed.

As I wanted to use the pen at home for letter writing and journaling and so forth, it seemed a good idea to acquire an additional nib and I ordered a modern Pelikan Fine, M200 stainless steel nib in the gold-coloured finish, from The Writing Desk. Yes, I know this sounds like a downgrade, but it is a Pelikan nib, it is the right colour, Pelikan stainless steel nibs are excellent (in my limited experience and from what I have read), plus it was an economical way of adapting the pen for regular practical use.

The new nib arrived within three working days and I was impressed and grateful that it had been checked and tested. A test card was signed and dated – a great service for a modest order and really helpful when buying online.

This time, my pen was already inked, with Conway Stewart Tavy from Diamine  as I unscrewed the nib with its fragile ebonite feed unit and replaced it with the Fine nib with its modern plastic feed, carefully keeping the pen upright. It is more accurate to say that I held the nib and feed still, firmly gripped in tissue paper, while unscrewing the barrel from the nib.  Having done this once already, it came out easily and the new stainless steel nib went in perfectly. Both pen and nib are doing well.

I am delighted with my choice. The Pelikan Fine seems to be nicely proportioned to my size of writing. I have generally thought of myself as a Medium nib person, but over the years as my writing has become faster and less legible, all the loops tend to get inked in and it is a treat to see some white space back in them again.

Admittedly the pen is still new to me, but at present I get a buzz at every opportunity to pick it up and write something with it.

My only other Pelikan stainless steel nib is on my M205 blue demonstrator from 2016 with which I chose a Broad which is beautifully smooth and one of the nicest nibs that I have ever used.

With its capacity of around 2ml, I expect one fill of ink to last me ages. Even in the M205 with its Broad nib, I got over 50 pages of an A5 notebook to one fill and so with a fine nib, I can expect a fair bit more than that. The extra fine nib might give double that mileage, so long as I do not get carried away with the broad wet flourishes that are readily available on applying a little pressure.

I did find that on the vintage M400, the cap did not post firmly. It rests on the back of the barrel quite deeply, to over half its length but did not grip and so tended to slide about. This was very easily remedied, simply by tucking a scrap of paper in the cap when posting, about half the size of a postage stamp and the problem is solved instantly. As I said, the pen is elderly. One has to make some allowances and treat it with care and respect.

Just over a week ago, a friend emailed me a link to a forthcoming local auction and mentioned that there were some fountain pens included. I had a browse at the online catalogue and began to get moderately excited at the prospect of acquiring a vintage  Pelikan M400 tortoise.

Still a newbie to the process, it was a novelty to log in to the sale room web site and submit  a bid. The auction was due to take place on Tuesday at 10:30am. With around 500 lots to get through and the fountain pen lots all coming towards the end of the sale, it was likely to be late afternoon before the Pelikan came up. On my only previous  experience with this auction, I had been hopeful of buying a burgundy Parker Duofold Centennial but was unprepared when the bidding sped past the estimate and I let it go.

I was quite expecting to be unsuccessful again and so had a back-up plan of bidding on one or two other pens, in the event that the Pelikan went to someone else.

In the event, when the Pelikan came up, as I listened online to the auctioneer, there were no higher bids placed and it went to me. (I should have walked away from the computer at that point content with my success. However I lingered online to see how the other pens sold. When a blue resin limited edition Sailor came up, I found my mouse hovering over the “Bid” button and, seeing off some half-hearted opposition, I found myself owning this pen as well, more of which another time).

I had been reading up online about the vintage Pelikan. On the following morning, I received the invoice for my two pens, by email from the auction rooms, which I thought was very speedy and efficient of them. I arranged to collect my pens later that day.

The Pelikan was fitted with a Rover 14k gold nib, extra fine, as the catalogue had stated. The pen was apparently an export model. I do not know the history of Rover nibs and am not sure whether the pen was first sold with this nib option (the piston turning knob does have the letters EF printed) or whether it might have been a later replacement of a Pelikan nib.

At home that evening, I was able to have a closer look at my purchase. The pen looked to be in a reasonably good condition for its age, which I believe dates from the early 1950’s.

On the barrel, barely legible unless with a loupe, are the words EXPORT and PELIKAN GUNTHER WAGNER.  The nib reads ROVER 585 EXTRA. (Presumably the word FINE is concealed by the section).(Update: No, on later removing the nib, I was surprised to see that below the word EXTRA, it reads “PO.45”)

Looking at the cap, there is no inscription on the cap band. I have read that this puts it as being an early model. There were plenty of shallow scratches on the cap, signs of general use, but these are not visible to the naked eye and are only cosmetic and do not worry me at all. There are a couple of tiny cracks no more than 2mm long just below the pocket clip ring, possibly due to shrinkage but again, of no concern.

The nib looks to be in good condition with some wear, as a smooth, rounded foot can be seen to the tipping material. I was excited to try the extra fine nib but had to be patient.

The feed is an ebonite one, with “longitudinal fins” which all looked intact. These can become brittle with age and are easily cracked. I had read up on the informative “The Pelikan’s Perch” blog, how to go about removing the nib and feed, taking great care not to damage the feed.

First I wished to establish whether the nib and feed were screw fit or friction fit. Again, I learned this week that some rare early models were friction fit and that this design was briefly repeated later when the model was re-introduced.

I tried operating the piston. This was very promising. The piston traveled up and down and still felt reasonably stiff. The attractive tortoise-shell coloured, striped resin barrel gave a good view of the piston, when held up to the light.

I wanted to measure the take up into the reservoir. I have contrived my own simple device for this, being a syringe, with the plunger removed and with the nozzle plugged with a match stick. This I attach to a vertical object (the bathroom clock!) with an elastic band, and fill the syringe with water using a pipette, up to the 5ml mark.

I then held the Pelikan nib down in the syringe, and filled it with water, as you would with ink. I was pleasantly surprised to see the water level drop down to 3ml, indicating a good 2ml capacity in the Pelikan.

Ejecting this first lot of water, produced some old blue ink residue from the pen and I flushed it a couple more times, before then leaving the pen filled with water and standing in a jar of water up over the nib to have a good soak.I left it for 24 hours.

The following evening, flushing the pen a few more times, I then tried for the first time to remove the nib.Gripping the nib and feed firmly, wrapped in several layers of tissue paper, I held these still while attempting to rotate the barrel towards me, thus unscrewing the nib anti-clockwise. I was delighted when the nib began to unscrew, with no difficulty at all and I was able to remove and wash the nib and feed unit. I gather that these are interchangeable with modern nib and feed units for the M200 and M400 series pens, so that I could try the 14k gold EF in my modern M205 blue demonstrator, or the steel broad from the M205 in the vintage tortoise.

Before I filled the pen for the first time, I had to make the choice of a suitable ink. I decided to go either for Waterman Serenity Blue, or Diamine’s Conway Stewart Tavy, for this first fill. Dipping the pen in each of these ink in turn, I settled upon the Tavy, as a darker more legible line in the extra fine nib. I also like the dark blue-black tones of this ink which seemed fitting for the vintage pen, such that you might find on a letter from the 1950’s.

I was concerned as to how well the old cork piston seal might work, on a pen of perhaps over 65 years of age. The piston had drawn up water to a very satisfactory capacity, but I did not know whether it might leak from the back once filled with ink. I had spent an evening reading about removing piston assemblies from these pens, by means of a dowling rod inserted through the nib end and this sounded much too advanced and risky for me to attempt.  I very much hoped that the piston would be usable. If not, then I had an attractive and rather expensive dip pen or a nib unit that I could use in other pens.

And so that night, the pen suffered the indignity of being stood in a glass jar to check for any accidents overnight. Happily (and this really has been a lucky story so far) there were no signs of any leakage.

So how does it write? Well, the nib is far softer than any I had experienced. A little pressure spreads the narrow tines to produce a lovely characterful broad wet stroke. Without pressure the pen writes a very fine line. I was pleased with my ink choice. The nib wrote smoothly when writing with my left elbow tucked in to my side (I am left handed) but when writing in my ungainly, overhand slanting style, with paper tilted and my left hand above the line (a bad habit from childhood to avoid smudging wet ink), then the nib was a bit scratchy. So I will go with what it likes best.

I amused myself trying the pen on every available type of paper. It suits smooth papers best. And I discovered a new source of amusement, in writing with the reverse side of a vintage extra fine nib, to give an extra extra fine line! This enables you to write in such miniscule letters, aided by a magnifying glass as you go, that you can achieve up to six lines of writing in one row of an exercise book. I then attempted the Lord’s Prayer which I managed to fit into three rows,  which is less than one inch deep. This is of limited application I know, but fun to try nevertheless.