Restoring a Sheaffer Balance 500

 

The Pen

When Sheaffer introduced the Balance at the end of the 1920s, fountain pens were still largely built around a familiar cylindrical shape. The Balance changed that with a streamlined, tapered profile that helped push the broader pen industry toward the cigar-shaped designs that would become common throughout the 1930s. Sheaffer introduced the design in late 1928, with its U.S. design patent issued the following year. 

The Balance would remain an important part of Sheaffer’s lineup for more than a decade, evolving through different sizes, colors, filling systems, nibs, and price points.

This example is a Sheaffer Balance 500 in Golden Brown Striated celluloid. The color was introduced in the late 1930s, and comparable lever-filling 500 models with this style of clip and Feather Touch #5 nib are generally dated to the late 1930s into the early 1940s. 

The “500” marking reflected its $5 price point rather than a modern model-number system. This version was positioned below Sheaffer’s Lifetime pens and paired with the two-tone Feather Touch #5 nib, giving buyers a gold-nibbed Sheaffer without stepping up to the company’s premium White Dot models.

The Golden Brown Striated material is one of the things that makes these later Balances so appealing today. In ordinary light, it can look fairly restrained. Under brighter light, the alternating brown and amber layers become much more pronounced, with translucent sections running through the barrel.

This particular pen also retained a very sharp Sheaffer barrel imprint, along with the much lighter 500 marking.

Mechanically, it was complete.

Cosmetically, it had some history to deal with.

The Restoration

At first glance, this looked like a fairly straightforward Balance restoration.

The trim was tarnished, the nib was covered in old ink, and the barrel had accumulated the kind of scratching you would expect from a pen that had spent decades being carried and used.

Then I started looking at the barrel more closely.

A few of the scratches were considerably deeper than they first appeared. There was also one mark that looked very much like someone gave the cap a bite at one point 

That changed the job a little.

Surface scratches are easy to think about. You polish until they disappear. A deep mark is different, because every bit of damage you remove also means removing some of the pen itself.

So the question became less about whether I could remove the bite mark and more about whether I should.

Before getting that far, I disassembled the pen.

Inside was something I don't get to see very often: the old ink sac was still there.

It had not turned to dust or shattered into hardened pieces. It still looked like an ink sac. It had simply lost the elasticity that made it useful. Pressing it no longer produced the spring and recovery needed for a reliable filling system.

That part had reached the end of its working life, so it was replaced.

The pressure bar was a different story.

It was still sound, still straight, and still perfectly capable of doing its job. There was no reason to replace an original part simply because I had a new one available. It was cleaned and returned to the pen.

The same basic idea ended up guiding the cosmetic work.

The lever responded immediately to polishing. What initially looked dull and tarnished came back bright. The clip and cap band did the same, and fortunately neither required aggressive work to present well again.

The nib took more cleaning.

Years of dried ink had collected across the Feather Touch #5 and largely obscured the contrast of the two-tone finish. Once the old ink was removed, the nib underneath was in far better condition than its first appearance suggested. The gold and contrasting mask regained their luster, turning what had looked like one of the tired parts of the pen into one of its best features.

Then there was the barrel.

I worked through the scratches gradually rather than trying to erase everything at once. One by one, the deeper lines disappeared and the Golden Brown Striated celluloid began to show the depth and gloss that had been hidden beneath them.

The bite mark improved too.

And then I stopped.

I could still see a faint trace of it. With enough additional polishing, I probably could have chased it farther. But at that point I would have been removing good original celluloid simply to erase the last evidence that the mark had ever existed.

That didn't feel like restoration anymore.

The goal wasn't to make the pen look new. It was to make it look cared for again while keeping as much of the original pen as possible.

So the faint mark stayed.

After the new sac was installed, with the original pressure bar in place and the pen was reassembled. The filling system worked properly again, and after some nib adjustment the Feather Touch #5 settled into a smooth medium line with a little spring to it.

The finished pen is not flawless.

I think that's important.

There is still a tiny reminder on the barrel that somebody owned this pen before I did and apparently, for at least one moment, treated it more like a pencil than a fountain pen.

But now the scratches no longer dominate the surface. The Golden Brown celluloid has its depth back. The trim shines again. The Feather Touch nib looks the way it should. And inside the barrel, the original pressure bar is still doing the same job Sheaffer intended it to do roughly eight decades ago.

This one didn't need every trace of its past erased.

It just needed enough work to let the pen show through again.