Welcome

Here you’ll find my restored fountain pens — for sale, bargains, clearance, recent sales, and my personal collection — as well as Thoughts from my workbench. Please bookmark it, return regularly, and join my email list!

What’s new!

Dear Friends:

Welcome to Maybe Spring in NYC!  Winter was not slow at Timsvintagepens — customer repairs, restoration sales, and correspondence continue to grow. In fact, December was the busiest month ever here in my little shop! In addition, repair volume was high, and somehow I fit in work on a few major projects. Among other things, I’m experimenting with a better (for me) way to repair Aurora 88 piston cork mounts and have developed better workflow in using my lathe to trim and sand piston corks, which I sometimes prefer to using o-rings. Over the next few months, I’m planning an all-out assault on demystifying the complexity of restoring Sheaffer Triumph Vac-fillers.  

Regarding the imbroglio about Lamy’s reintroduction of Dark Lilac ink, it’s not a subject that I am passionate about, but I will note that while Lamy ink is generally very good dye-based ink for wet-writing fountain pens, Dark Lilac in either of its iterations is not. The lovely gold sheen is pigment, and its use should be directed toward your modern pens.    

This new batch, as usual, covers a wide range of brands in For Sale, particularly including an Aurora 88, a Sheaffer Premier and 2d Generation Parker Vacumatic from my personal collection, and a Parker 51 Vacumatic Demi, in addition to various new listings in Tim’s Bargains, and a new Thought about the importance of size in fountain pen functioning. Enjoy the new listings, keep your emails coming! 

As always, do feel free to reach out to me if you have any fountain pen questions, whether general or guidance in purchasing from me or elsewhere. I always enjoy and learn from your questions and issues. If you’re considering selling one or more vintage pens, remember that I accept consignment sales as well! 

Tim Ettenheim

How to Purchase a Pen

To purchase or inquire about a pen, please visit the Contact page and send me a note about which pen you wish to buy. When you’re ready to purchase, I will send an invoice. Details about purchasing and payment, warranty, and returns are here .

If you’re shopping for a present but don’t know what to purchase, Timsvintagepens also has gift certificates, available in any denomination you’d like, no extra charge, no expiration, just ask.

About Timsvintagepens

My journey in the fascinating world of fountain pens started with a Parker 21 in the 1960s. For the next forty years, I was a pen user, adding a Montblanc 149 and Pelikan 120 in 1970. In 2007, my tastes broadened with the addition of my late father-in-law’s Parker 51s, which kindled my need to know how pens worked and how to make them work better. In the years since, my pen use and broadening skills have blossomed into a fully-grown practice of restoring, repairing, and selling pens. With effort, much good teaching, and continual study, my skills have steadily become more sophisticated, so that I am now able to restore most vintage pens I see to a level of functioning and appearance that is at least as good as they were when new.

Timsvintagepens is a vintage practice in which I restore, repair and sell what I find interesting. I work with a wide variety of American and European pens, generally from the 1910s-1970s, from the well-known Parkers and Sheaffers to the lesser known and less often seen, many of which suffered only from inadequate marketing. To me, vintage pens are endlessly fascinating objects, and enabling their return for new careers is my passion. In addition, Timsvintagepens is now available to inventory and curate vintage fountain pen collections in preparation for auction or sale.