Waterman Carène fountain pen nib repair

For decades, the French-based company Waterman was a hallmark of high-quality writing instruments. I use the past tense because, in the course of repairing fountain pens, I have encountered numerous modern Waterman pens of inferior quality. In some cases, rust had eaten away the underside of the nib; in others, the metal was poor quality and bent easily. Waterman laser-engraves many of its inscriptions, which also seem less carefully finished than those of other brands. The Carène is one of its higher-quality models, although its 18-carat gold nib is also laser-engraved. Gravity, however, affects every nib: even the best-quality nib can be damaged if the pen is dropped. That is what happened to the nib shown here. Someone had already attempted a repair, but it needed further work because it frequently skipped while writing. The top photo shows the nib as I received it, and the bottom photo shows the finished result. The work was not straightforward…

The Carène has a particularly sophisticated nib design. Whereas a conventional nib can be carefully pulled out, the Carène’s nib is glued into the pen body. To remove it for repair, I had to cut through the adhesive beneath it using a very thin, sharp steel blade. First, however, I had to remove the feed, which required rubber-coated tweezers.

In the picture below you can clearly see the individual elements of the nib.

Once the nib was removed, I could begin the repair. The fall had bent the entire metal body by about 2 mm, leaving a gap between the nib and the feed and interrupting the ink flow. Bending it back by precisely the right amount was tricky: a 2 mm adjustment brought it back into contact with the feed. A 3 mm adjustment would make the two tines spread apart, while ink would not bridge a 1 mm gap. Gently shaking the pen could temporarily fill the gap with ink, but once that ink had been used up, the pen would stop writing again.

Once the nib repair was complete, I could reassemble and test the pen. The black feed is quite large, so it took nearly a minute for ink from the cartridge to travel through its capillary channels to the nib tip.


The finished repair, with the nib glued back into place:

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