Diamond Point "Challenger"

This one took a little longer than expected, mostly because I had to wait for the right parts to finish it. It was worth the wait.

Full restoration video.

The Pen and Its History

This is a Diamond Point lever-fill fountain pen dating to approximately the late 1930s. Pens of this style are commonly referred to by collectors as the Diamond Point “Challenger,” largely because of their resemblance to Parker's Royal Challenger pens from the same period.

Diamond Point was a New York pen manufacturer that occupied an interesting part of the fountain pen market. The company wasn't competing directly with Parker, Sheaffer, Waterman, or Wahl-Eversharp at the top of the market, but its pens weren't bottom-of-the-barrel products either. Diamond Point produced some very attractive and surprisingly well-made pens, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s.

One of the company's strengths was its use of colorful plastics, and this pen is a great example. The green marbled material has an incredible amount of depth. Depending on the light, it shifts between dark green, olive, cream, yellow, and almost pearlescent streaks.

That material is probably the first thing anyone notices about the pen today.

The metal trim tells a different story.

Diamond Point appears to have saved some money by using relatively thin gold plating on many of its pens. That plating did not always age nearly as well as the bodies themselves. On this example, the clip and lever both had substantial wear and corrosion, and most of the gold-colored plating on the nib was already gone by the time the pen reached me.

Interestingly, surviving late-1930s Diamond Point pens appear in a number of plastics and trim variations. Contemporary examples also closely resemble materials being used by larger manufacturers at the time. That makes an exact model designation difficult, but the construction and styling place this one comfortably in that late-1930s Challenger-style group.

The Restoration

Mechanically, this pen needed considerably more work than its exterior initially suggested.

The original ink sac was long gone, and there was no pressure bar inside the barrel.   I suspect that someone attempted a restoration before me.  Until I had the correct replacement parts, the restoration essentially stopped there. The pen sat on my bench for a while waiting for a new pressure bar before I could finally finish the filling system.

Once the parts arrived, I installed the replacement pressure bar and fitted the pen with a new size 16 ink sac.

The lever also needed attention. Years of corrosion had left the exposed metal rough and discolored. I cleaned it carefully and removed what corrosion I reasonably could, but I intentionally stopped short of trying to make the trim look new. Much of the original plating was already gone, and aggressive polishing would have removed even more.

The same approach applied to the clip and nib.

There comes a point with old plated hardware where further polishing stops being restoration and starts becoming removal. The remaining finish is part of the pen now, so I cleaned and stabilized it rather than chasing a perfect shine that wasn't realistically there anymore.

The body was a completely different story.

Underneath the accumulated grime and surface wear was some beautiful material. Careful cleaning and polishing brought the green marbling back to life without making the pen look artificially new. The more I worked on it, the more depth appeared in the plastic.

That became my favorite part of the restoration.

Once everything was reassembled, I tested the lever filling system, checked the sac installation, and put the pen through its final writing test. After sitting unusable for who knows how many decades, it was filling and writing again.

The scratches, plating loss, and worn hardware tell you that the pen has lived a life. The green marbled body tells you why someone thought it was worth buying in the first place.

Nearly ninety years later, it is ready to be used again.