:EDIT: This pen is bakelite, not celluloid. I can conclusively say that now. I found a source comparing the Chinese Red celluloid Dollar Pen and the Cardinal Red bakelite one – mine is definitely bakelite. Bakelite is also very prone to cracking, as you’ll read about in this post.

Alright! This is my first repair post, so bear with me!

The Ingersoll Dollar Pen was a third tier budget pen produced in the ’20s and sold for – you guessed it – one dollar. Ingersoll was all about giving the customer practical value for their money, particularly in the form of a very high quality 14k nib. You’ll see exactly what I mean by “practical value” by reading that link above, or the rest of my post.

A week or so ago I acquired an Ingersoll Dollar Pen(a twist-filling pen that wrings out a sac rather than compressing it) in red celluloid or bakelite (I’m unsure which. They were made in both. Celluloid is rarer. The seller thinks bakelite, I think celluloid) off Ebay from a very friendly seller. ~$40 shipped got me the pen and a Redipoint propelling pencil, which I’ll be posting about in the next few days. Upon receiving the pen, I noticed that the picture from Ebay wasn’t innacurate – the twist knob was hanging off the back of the pen!

See the knob on the end of the pen? The one that looks like it should be flush with the back of the barrel, but isn’t? Yeah, that one. It was every bit as loose as it looks, and when you picked the pen up and moved it, it would flop around.

The seller had resacced the pen right before selling, and said they’d been using it for ~15 odd years with no trouble. They were right – their resaccing method worked. Turn the knob and the pen fills, just as it should.

However, I wasn’t going to deal with the pain of a loose knob. I removed the section (press-fitted, not threaded) and pulled the sac off of the section. Now the sac was hanging from the inside of the barrel. It came out easily enough, I just grabbed it with a hemostat and pulled. In hindsight, I should’ve learned more about the mechanism first – I could’ve easily damaged something and ruined the pen.

Fortunately I didn’t. I got the sac out with nothing harmed. I saw that the sac had adhesive on the end of it – shellac, I assume. It had been glued to a surface inside the barrel, which was in turn attached to the knob. Turning the knob would turn the top end of the sac, but the bottom end (attached to the nipple) would stay stationary – wringing the sac out, and sucking ink up upon release. More or less how a twist filler should work.

Not knowing the proper way to replace the sac, I assumed this was right. I just figured that the seller hadn’t cut the sac short enough, so there wasn’t enough tension to keep the knob tight on the end of the barrel. So I took a size 22 latex sac and cut it down to size (a little bit shorter than I’d want for a lever filler of this size – I’ll refer you to Richard Binder’s resaccing guide for how to measure proper length), and started trying to attach it the way the seller had. My first attempt was extremely clumsy – I used a long brush to dab shellac on the surface that I’d be attaching the sac to. Then I turned the pen upside down in an ink sample vial, stuck a dowel inside the sac, and used masking tape to hold the dowel down with pressure.

That didn’t work. I let the sac sit like that for a couple hours, then tested it. It pulled right off, no resistance. My next attempt was sticking a Waterman cartridge down the sac and holding it in place – also a failure, largely due to the shape of the end of a Waterman cartridge. Shoulda just used a dowel.

I’m glad I didn’t though, because I might not have figured out the right way to do it if I’d semi-succeeded like that.

See, this is where we’re gonna learn about how Ingersoll provided practical value.

I’d been wondering how exactly this pen had been built. Like, how was it constructed? The knob turned freely in both directions for more rotations than I could count, so I knew it wasn’t threaded into the barrel. So it must be attached to the object inside the barrel, right?

Turns out, Ingersoll had a similar idea to Wearever a couple decades later: They used an upholstery tack for the twist knob. The knob is a tack, and the object in the barrel is a small cylinder of hard rubber. The tack is pressed into the hard rubber plug the same way it’d be pressed into a wall to hold up a Taylor Swift poster.

Turns out, repairing this pen is super easy. You take a thin piece of metal or plastic with a groove in it (I used a nightlight cover and cut a groove in it with a rotary tool) to pull the tack out. Or you can grab the stem of it with pliers. I’d suggest not doing that, for gentleness sake. Just be careful to keep a watch on where it flies when you yank it out, and don’t do this towards your face.

That’s how you remove the tack. It’ll come right out, and the plug will fall out of the barrel. Easy-peasy. There may be a small conical washer between the tack and barrel too – it depends on when the pen was made. Check before removing the tack, and make sure to keep an eye on where it flies.

Then, chip any old sac off of the plug, and take your new sac (size 20-22) and snip the end off it, so it’s a straight sac with a hole on both sides. Attach one end to the plug. If you use a 22, you may need to build up the plug a bit first – I used a clipping from a size 15 sac to build the plug up so the 22 would fit tightly.

Next, mark the nib’s position in the section (tape on the section, marker to point to the sides of the nib) and use a knockout block to remove the nib and feed from the section. Attach the sac to the section nipple. Then, after it all dries, drop the plug/sac/section into the barrel (without pushing the section in yet), drop the tack (and washer) into a sample vial, point up. Place the barrel end-down over the tack, so the tack is poking into the hole in the end of the barrel. Stick a dowel down through the section, and use a hammer to tap the plug down into the tack as far as it’ll go. This will secure the tack on the end of the barrel and ensure it’s flush.

Reinsert the nib and feed carefully, and you’re good to go!

I’d love to hear some feedback on this post! Please feel free to comment below, use the contact form, or message me on Reddit/FPN!

A teaser for an upcoming post: This pen’s cap cracked in transit to me.

Fortunately, the seller was very kind and refunded me some cash and apologized. Theygoes by “marbrutin” on Ebay, and I highly recommend them. I’m using their image and username with their permission.