It made it almost exactly to its two year anniversary. Just 13 days short, in fact.

The other day I noticed my A2 seemed to be clogging and drying out an awful lot, and was giving me trouble even after a quite thorough cleaning of the nib and feed assembly. Then the light bulb in my head finally started to give a flicker, and I took a closer look at the little trap door in the nose and sure enough: It’s not springing closed anymore.

So obviously I did the only logical thing and placed an order for a brand new and very shiny A1 Press, the metal bodied variant, to have something to tide me over while I figure this out.

The A1’s very nice. I slapped my modified oblique nib assembly into it and it’s off and running like champ. Superficially it’s every bit of a poor man’s Vanishing Point and for only $8 more it’s a no-brainer for anyone holding a busted A2… Provided it manages to hold up as well or better. That says maybe.

But never mind that, because today I says to myself, I says: What do I have to lose if I rip my old A2 apart? Because this right here, this could be content.

The nose cone of the Majohn A2 (and presumably the A1 and A3, the OG Pilot Vanishing point itself, and other similar variants) is glued on. It’s obviously not meant to be functionally user removable, but I managed to get the adhesive to let go via the simple expedient of throwing caution totally to the wind and briefly boiling the front section in a pot of water. I figured this was probably a less dumb avenue of attack than cooking it with my heat gun, which is what I was going to graduate to if this strategy failed.

But it didn’t. Wa-hey. So here’s what the business end of an A2 looks like with the nosecone ripped off. It’s totally held together with a vaguely unctuous glue that seems to remain somewhat flexible, which may or may not be a consequence of my boiling it. It feels like ordinary contact cement and I imagine when you go to put the thing back together maybe you could substitute it with the same.

The trap door is a tiny stamped steel part and it seals up against a rubber (or possibly silicone) bucking seal that’s just pressed into the end. An infinitesimally microscopic little torsion spring is what serves to keep the trap door shut against the seal.

Except as you can see in my case it… doesn’t.

It’s busted clean off right at the end of the coiled section, where the arm goes up to hook into the trap door. It beats the hell out of me how that happened, but I guess it’s just one of those things. I’m glad it happened to my $27 knockoff and not my $180 genuine Vanishing Point. (“If you have a genuine VP, why don’t you just use that?” I hear you cry. Because I don’t ever take my Vanishing Point, my Dialog, or my vintage Sheaffer Targa into the field. I may be stupid, but I’m not made of money.)

Anyway, once you’re in there it’s easy enough to get everything out. Even the rubber seal is removable, and just indexes into a little notch in the guide tube at the end of the pen. The spring and trap door are held in with the same cross pin that’s also the pivot point for the door.

It’s worth mentioning that the guide tube is also just glued in, and its alignment relative to the pen body is crucial to allowing the nib assembly to slide in and out freely. If you find yours is binding up after ripping your pen apart, you’ll want to gently heat it up and stick something in it to help you straighten it out until the glue cools. It didn’t take much heat to get the adhesive to let go, and that raises the irritating possibility that just leaving your A2 in a hot car could be enough to compromise the adhesive and give you problems. I imagine this is probably not the case with the genuine article, and would go a long way towards explaining the roughly sextuple premium in cost. I reckon I’ll goop this up with T-7000 glue or something when or more likely if I ever put this back together, to make sure it stays put.

Because the question is, now what?

The spring is seriously tiny. Insofar as I can tell you can’t buy it as a repair part separately, even for a genuine Vanishing Point. So the only option is to bin the thing, or have a go at making your own replacement. I measured its wire diameter at 0.26mm which is pretty much 23 wire gauge. One unit of 23 AWG watchmaker’s spring wire is $27.50 but a whole new pen is only $27.99. The only reason to even attempt to wind my own spring for this would be for the lulz, and of course for the content. Clearly only a fool would even try.

…

So, I just ordered a roll of that wire.

Wish me luck. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.