Change of plans

I was going to be good. I really was. After my one-off night shift (the worst kind of night shift) I was going to go and extract data from notes. That was the plan (batman). However… it turns out that the person who I spoke to before who said ‘same day, possibly’ was talking out of his hat, or misunderstood my request.

Next day probably is the way it works with the notes request. So hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to do the data extraction. Today, in my tired and disorientated state I’ll dink with non work things. Hopefully the bit will arrive so I can try out my repaired fountain pen. The ink’s been sat on my desk taunting me for days….

I’ll do some work on Kathryn’s present…

Dunno what else. We shall see.

I have ordered some better locks for the motorcycle (this combined with the GPS tracker should make it less interesting to thieves. That and being a D-reg, but Kawasaki GT-550s are still quite popular motorbikes).

But essentially, the day is mine. I shall relax, poke the internet with sticks and attempt to come up with an answer to the water ingress problem. Thing is I don’t want to call a roofer, and have them go ‘Oh yeah, your roof is the problem’ when it might just be the cladding which is a bit weird and letting water run in. And I don’t want to call someone up who does cladding and say ‘our cladding is hinky, please fix it’ when it’s the roof that’s letting in water. Who do I call? That’s the question.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

And she writes

A joke that only makes sense in my head.

Anyhow, today the package came from Cathedral Pens containing (I hoped) the bits I would need to fix the Platignum fountain pen. Having cleaned it and straightened its nib, all that was left was to change the ink sac, a remarkably simple affair.

But before we get to that, I have to point out some ace customer service. Because Cathedral Pens actually looked at my blog post, then mailed me a complimentary ink sac in a different size, because they suspected I’d mismeasured. I had. I should have gone and got the micrometer from the garage, but I didn’t. I did it with a traditional measuring stick*, and it wasn’t accurate enough.

Not only that, as inspiration, they very kindly added in a free Parker 45 (the VW Beetle of fountain pens, apparently. Hardy and nearly indestructable).

Unfortunately we were both not quite right, their guess from the photo was closer, but marginally too large. My measurement was marginally too small. However, given that this is my first attempt and something that I may work at in future, I looked at my minisac** and decided to try it on for size***. It was a little tight, but it did just fit over the end****. So I trimmed it to length, applied slipped it only just on, applied a thin bead of shellac *****, and snuck the sac down onto the section and left the shellac to harden. I then needed to source some unscented talc… a trip to the chemists yeilded that (Simple Talc, £1, bargain :) ).

The pen slipped together and…

And for comparison, here’s the 45 at work:

I fear the minimal size of the ink sac on my rebuild, but until I give it a bit of a workout I won’t know if it’s any good :)

Anyhow, so that’s my excitement :)

* Or ‘ruler’ as some would call them.
** That sounds wrong…somehow.
*** It’s getting worse.
**** I’m sorry, but I have been actually awake for 28 hours, 12 of them spent at work….
***** Again, thanks to Cathedral Pens for the application tip, it was perfect :)

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.