The black streamlined Duofold Senior shown above came my way at the recent Chicago pen show. With complete lack of foresight I cleaned the tarnish off the clip and cap bands before photographing it, even though I knew that that tarnish was interesting -- for it was that characteristic dark grey that forms on gold only when it is on top of a silver substrate. This is consistent with other features of this pen, most notably the late 1944 date code and the use of celluloid rather than hard rubber for the section, blind cap, and cap top/inner cap. The pressure bar is three-piece, consistent with all the rest.
So why is the tarnish interesting? We already know that Parker periodically cleared out excess inventory of older spare parts by assembling them into complete pens, and that such pens typically bear date codes from well after their regular production was discontinued (I write "periodically" because the date codes on these pens aren't evenly distributed, but rather form distinct clusters). We also know that in many cases parts had to be made to complete these pens, as they often differ in subtle ways from the parts from the original production run. That is surely the case here, for Parker only began to substitute
silver for brass as a substrate with the advent of WW2, which tells us that the clip must have been made around the time the pen was assembled, and that it was not an older part taken from inventory. The cap bands also must be war-era, which suggests that the entire cap was made then as well -- though it is not inconceivable that this started out as one of those caps kept in inventory in bandless state, allowing for customization for special order trim configurations.
