Oiler Pen, aka Rotring?

[ISW]

I recently purchased this 'oiler pen' at a local hardware store. It came without any oil, so I had to open it to fill it with oil. And what did I find inside? Well, for those of you who remember doing engineering drawings before the advent of CAD, you'll remember the name Rotring, who made the drafting pens we all used to use.

 

Essentially, this oiler pen is a Rotring pen, just with the ink replaced by oil. So, if any of you have any old Rotring pens lying around, you can easily re-purpose them for oiling locomotives.

 

Ian

 

[ardbealach]

Goodness a Rotring pen - that takes me back!  And don't forget a double edged razor blade for scratching out mistakes. (Alisdair)

[peterfgf]

Rotrings were/are superb drafting pens - the best of the lot.  What an incredible waste to use one as an oiler (but at that price...?)

Peterfgf

 

[Ben Alder]

Afraid a bit like quill pens - their time has passed. Still have a box of nibs etc in the shop for a range of their pens with no hope of ever selling them. At least these are being repurposed.....

 

[rab]

11 hours ago, ardbealach said:

Goodness a Rotring pen - that takes me back!  And don't forget a double edged razor blade for scratching out mistakes. (Alisdair)

We were a bit more up market, we had scalpels

 

[ISW]

My favourite design office 'trick' was using the ammonia copier. Take the velum / plastic sheet of the drawing you wanted to copy. Cut off a length of yellowed copier plastic sheet. Carefully apply sellotape to the copier sheet corresponding to those areas you didn't want to copy. Put the copier sheet and original through the ammonia copier as usual, including the developer stage. Then remove the sellotape and run the copy through just the light (first) stage of the copier. Result; a copy with the sellotaped areas completely blank, no 'scraping' with razor blades required. I use this trick quite a few times to remove title blocks!

 

Ian

[ISW]

12 hours ago, peterfgf said:

Rotrings were/are superb drafting pens - the best of the lot.  What an incredible waste to use one as an oiler (but at that price...?)

Peterfgf

 

I'm not saying these oilers are 'actual' Rotring pens (not at £1.99), but they use basically the same technology and components. So, if you have any Rotring pens lying around (I know I do!) then they could be re-purposed as oiler pens. I'm guessing a 0.5mm or 0.7mm one would be the best.

 

Ian

[Jol Wilkinson]

11 hours ago, Ben Alder said:

Afraid a bit like quill pens - their time has passed. Still have a box of nibs etc in the shop for a range of their pens with no hope of ever selling them. At least these are being repurposed.....

 

What sizes do you have? I might be interested in some.

[rab]

6 hours ago, ISW said:

I'm not saying these oilers are 'actual' Rotring pens (not at £1.99), but they use basically the same technology and components. So, if you have any Rotring pens lying around (I know I do!) then they could be re-purposed as oiler pens. I'm guessing a 0.5mm or 0.7mm one would be the best.

 

Ian

I still have mine, filed away in the

'might come in useful one day' box;

looks like they just have.

My only concern is how the internals

would cope with oil instead of ink.

Only one way to find out I suppose.On

Nothing ventured, nothing lost.

[ardbealach]

On the same theme, I also liked the Pelikan Graphos pen set which gave a crisper line.  Found this at the back of a drawer here in my shed.  Last used well over 30 years ago so I reckon the ink might in the cartridge might have gone a bit hard.  Maybe the time has come to put in the bin and not back in the drawer.  (Alisdair)

[ISW]

57 minutes ago, ardbealach said:

Maybe the time has come to put in the bin and not back in the drawer.  (Alisdair)

or put in on TheBay. They seem to go for ~£20.

 

Ian