1970s New High Quality Pelikan 120 Merz & Krell (Type 2) P120MK Vintage Fountain Pen Replacement Clip Holding Captop "Crown" Part In Black, Blue, Red, Yellow & Olive Green, Made in UK Item ID: DEL-171

Pelikan 120 Merz & Krell Captop

We are thrilled to finally offer this product after several years of development work, finally finding a solution to a very nagging and very common problem with the original Pelikan 120 Merz and Krell model, where most of the captops on those pens are cracked.

The 1970s Pelikan 120 Merz and Krell, was one of the first pens outsourced for manufacturing by Pelikan to a company known as Merz & Krell in Germany which manufactured this model among several other models of various brands, such as Senator, Melbi and others.

The P120MK pen is superb in every way, and it is the pen of choice for many artists, architects and other folks loving fine writing. It features a very elegant piston filling system easily removable for maintenance and cleaning, streamlined modern design, a nice stainless steel gold plated nib, ebonite feed, strong elongated collar, a sturdy thick cap with a strong tapered cap ring, nice soft and thick clip easily sliding over any thickness pocket fabric... simply put, close to a perfect fountain pen! It is one of our favorites!

However, one thing was plaguing this pen... that is the original captop. We have handled hundreds upon hundreds of these pens, and we can safely say, approximately 90% of them come to us with a cracked captop, despite the rest of the pen being still in superb condition as the pen was made so strongly and nicely.

Hence, being the pen nerds we are, and hating seeing all of those lovely P120MKs rendered useless, we set on a journey to build this part together with our trusted fabricator from the UK, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Roger Wolfe. Upon several years in development and choice of materials and techniques, we finally got it right!

This is not a part that can be 3D printed, as it has a very fine inside thread. Nor most of the 3D printing materials are suitable for such a part. The only way to fabricate it, is basically by hand from a very strong, dense Acrylic sourced from Italy, a compound specially developed for such complex fine parts. Each captop is made by hand on a lathe and a small batch requires hours of work, and after it is finished on the lathe, each part requires hand finetuning and finally polishing. Approximately 90-95% of the acrylic block is waste material, so it is extremely expensive and labor intensive to fabricate this part.

Nonetheless, it is the only part that plagued this pen for so long and we believe it's worth the effort, as it will bring all of those misfits, clipless, captopless P120MKs back to life and back to enjoyment and servitude!

The original captop cracked as it has much thinner walls at the bottom edge since the thread was receded inwards. When the user would tighten the captop, the thread will "push outwards" and the cracks will start propagating on that bottom edge that comes in contact with the clip. Even if this was done gently without over-tightening, the simple movement/flexing of the clip over time will make these cracks appear, as the walls of this edge are so thin. We are not sure why they made that design decision, but it is obvious it was a design flaw.

Our replacement captop, even though it is virtually the same on the outside, including the outside diameter, the overall shape and size, it features much thicker walls and has much wider surface contact area with the clip, i.e. "biting" over the clip because the thread starts at the very edge, and there is no thin edge area. We have tried many times to crack this captop, even to the point of virtually breaking off a clip with a hand, and the captop would not give away, nor crack, stayed rock solid on the cap.

Therefore we can now proudly say, we finally solved this problem, and these captops are now available to the world of P120MK users.

We took it even a step further, with the inspiration of other pen models from the past which were sold with a variety of captop colors, such as some Kaweco pens, so the user could use several pens of the same model, only with different color captop so he/she could easily distinguish  which ink color is in which pen, very nice, practical and handy feature. Hence, in addition to the original black color, we offer the captop in Blue, Red, Yellow, and very close to the body color matching Olive Green, so you can match it with the color of the inks you are using.

In case you need an original P120MK clip too, you can find it here: P120M&K Clip.

If you need a captop for the first Pelikan 120 series from the 1950s, you can find it here: Pelikan 120 1950s captop.

*** The listing price is for One Captop. If you place the order for more than one captop, please send us a follow up email stating which colors of captops you want shipped. If the order is for one captop, we will ship a Black one by default, so if you need black there is no need to send us a follow up email. But if you want a different color than black, please send an email specifying the color.