I do have a number of the later Capless pens, but like the smaller and lighter size of the earlier Namiki\/Pilot VP.\u00a0 Lots of people agree.\u00a0 They do have one weakness though.\u00a0 The “barrel”\u00a0 i.e the button end (VS what Pilot calls the “cap” which is the half with the clip) is plastic.\u00a0 There’s nothing to reinforce it, and the plastic threads engage with metal threads on the cap.\u00a0 There’s a lot of stress at that joint.\u00a0 The pens are prone to cracking, the threads to stripping, rendering the pen useless.\u00a0\u00a0 But darn it!\u00a0 We like<\/span> the pens!<\/p>\n You can solvent weld the cracks, but because of the stress placed on the edge of the barrel when you tighten it enough to stay attached it just cracks again.\u00a0 Then the threads…\u00a0 what do you do when the plastic fails and the threads strip off?\u00a0 The thing is that there’s this brass ring that screws into the barrel that holds the ratchet mechanism in place, so you can’t just glop some glue on and hope to get new threads somehow.<\/p>\n I thought about this for a while, and then started to play with the pens.\u00a0 David Isaacson says that when I start to play with an idea is when I get dangerous.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But play I did, doing some measuring, ordering of tools, and a little noodling around.\u00a0 The result is shown below.<\/p>\n The threaded insert is set\u00a0 into the machined barrel and secured with adhesive.\u00a0 It addresses both of the common problems.\u00a0 The threads are now metal to metal instead of plastic to metal, so they will hold up much better.\u00a0 The brass, instead of the plastic, now carries the stress when the barrel is tightened onto the cap. \u00a0\u00a0 The metal threads go back just to the point where the original plastic threads stopped, so the brass retaining ring is positioned where it should be, and stop at the front edge of the barrel.\u00a0 Not a little below, not a little above, but precisely<\/em> at the edge.<\/p>\n The picture below shows the barrel tightly screwed into position on the cap.\u00a0 The hard part is getting the insert positioned so that the facets of the barrel line up properly. \u00a0 .\u00a0 It’s a bit tricky and fussy, but it can be done if done with care.\u00a0\u00a0 The result feels very solid, and should add many years to the life of the pen.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 9\/3\/2016<\/p>\n This post was written over 4 years ago.\u00a0 I thought it might be worth adding an update.\u00a0 In the years since I started providing this repair, I’ve installed the threaded bushing on quite a few of the pens.\u00a0 Not one has come back, and to my knowledge none have failed.\u00a0 I have one of my own that has been filled and in use since it was done shortly after the post went up.\u00a0 The repair works.\u00a0 As one client put it at the end of his note thanking me for bringing his VP back to life said, “This is how Namiki should have made the pen in the first place!”\u00a0 I agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Namiki Vanishing Point, AKA the VP,\u00a0 predecessor to the Pilot Capless which is mistakenly called the VP, is one of my favorite pens.\u00a0 (have I confused you yet?) \u00a0 I have two or three of them at the moment, and have had three of the fabled “Stealth” models.\u00a0 I sold the last one before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[53,52,51,54],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pen-repair","tag-capless-pen-repar","tag-namiki-repair","tag-namki-vp-repair","tag-thread-repair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.mainstreetpens.com\/pix\/NamikiVPthreads.jpg\" "\\"VP")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.mainstreetpens.com\/pix\/NamikiVPbarrel.jpg\" "\\"Repaired")
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