Jack Lynch, my long time fellow pen collector friend and member of the Chicago Pen Club passed away recently. Jack was 95 years old and he appeared in good health last time I saw him several weeks ago.

Jack from a Chicago Pen Show a few years ago.



Jack was a day-dreamer. He liked to mess around on his lathe and machinery fashioning new ideas for fountain pens. He would create unique pens fashioned from spare parts, some off his newly invented parts, various acrylics, celluloid and hard rubber. He also made various colored aluminum vac fillers. His pens were quite unusual. Jack also manufactured parts for some of the primary pen manufacturers.

Here is a fountain pen that Jack gifted to me.



The cap and barrel is clear celluloid, the section is hard rubber, the feed is plastic comb design which holds a goodly amount of ink and it does not flood. The Parker-style washer clip has a very firm grip. The #6 steel gold-plated nib is from his good friend Brian Grey of edisonpen.com They had both worked on new designs over the years. Brian Grey and Jack were friends for almost 20 years.

What a nice writer my Jack Lynch pen…. and with just a fleeting thought from brain to hand it has a wee bit of flex. The pen can be fitted with an ink cartridge, a vac filler or can be filled with an eye dropper. How many pens can do that? The hard rubber section fits very snugly to the barrel and does not leak as an eyedropper. What a treasure, this will remain in my collection forever.





Do you have a story about one of your fountain pens?
Were you a Sumgai or did you just have a lucky day at a flea market? (OK, you all know what a Sumgai is, right?)

Happy hunting!