The little brother of my 12 1/2 VS, I got this on eBay on Fountain Pen Day last year, but it leaked ink everywhere when I tried to fill it. Clearly it needed restoring, but I never got around to it until recently:

And what a process it was! I had to take it apart. Even though I was carefully following Richard Binder’s great guide on Waterman repair, it was a very difficult endeavour. The pen stayed in a dismantled state for weeks until my O-rings arrived, because I didn’t have the technique nor equipment to make a cork seal.

Anyway, that eventually was solved, and after a few tests with water to check if the seal was tight, I inked it up and it was ready to go.

Or so I thought… one tine was chipped. In fact, it was missing the tipping on one side, and looked like it had had the very tip broken off, since the edge felt sharp and looked uneven.

So I got out my whetstone, dismantled the pen and evened it out (my first gold nib grind!), then put it all back together.

It’s a beautiful pen, with a body in great condition, and apart from the steep learning curve for repairing these, it was almost fun! It is a petite pen, though, a good deal shorter than the Pelikan M3xx series.

Finally, here’s a writing sample. The nib is really flexible and the feed is so good that it absolutely gushes ink, though it writes like a regular italic nib when unflexed. It managed to cause my Fabriano paper to feather, though I think that is the ink’s fault.

If you see one on the second-hand market, I highly recommend jumping on it! They can be had restored at fairly inexpensive prices, and date from the era before lever-fillers were invented.