Violence is No Solution

Restoration

By PensInk – On December 13th, 2016

Some time ago I got a grey lever filler, model SWAN № 3130 from Mabie Todd & Co. LTD:

In the past someone apparently tried to remove the shellac sealed grip section using an unsuitable tool, such as combination pliers. That left deep scratches in the material:

The grip section was made from ebonite (hard rubber), a quite resilient material that does not tend to crack even in such cases, as long as the feed isn’t removed.

Another advantage of this material is that it doesn’t melt when heated, but returns to its original shape. So, if the scratches only compressed the material but didn’t remove it, chances are good to fix the damage with repeated heat treatments only. That was the case here – additional grinding and thus removing of material was not neces­sary. The only side effect was that due the heat treatment also the engraved lettering ›SWAN‹ nearly disappeared: