A Swan No 6 Eternal Nib

A No 6 Swan Eternal nib is a considerable lump of gold.  I’m sure you could make a respectable wedding ring out of one.  It’s not the biggest of the Swan nibs, of course.  There’s the No 8, quite a bit larger still.  I hadn’t seen one in the flesh, as it were, until recently.  Eric had a very fine example to show me.

I took the opportunity to photograph this one while I had it out of the pen as the sac was drying.  As many will be aware, re-saccing a Leverless makes for an unusual order of reassembly.  First, the shellac on the sac and section have to dry completely – no shortcuts with this one!  Then the sac has to be slid into the barrel with a dowel inside it to keep it extended and, last, the feed and nib can finally be fitted to complete the job.  All this is because to work well a Leverless needs a barrel-filling size of sac, unlike lever-fillers and button-fillers.  I used a No 22 sac on this 4660.  Necked sacs are great for Leverlesses if you can find them.

The nib has been reunited with the pen now, ready for write-testing.  A matching pencil goes along with this one.  It was all Swans I restored this morning.  I’m planning that my next upload to the sales site will be a Swan Fest!