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Today's Fossil Friday contribution is about the chicago pneumatic air scribes. Periodic maintenance is highly important, but many new owner dont know how or are intimidated to open them up.

Hi everyone , Recently I’ve been looking into getting an air scribe and have looked at three, the cp9160, cp9361 and the dnsons ARO. Which would you recommend. The cp9160 is considerably cheaper than the other two scribes. Also, which scribe will be best for working on ammonites? And what would be the smallest possible compressor that could work with one of these? Thanks.

Hello everyone, Just spotted this online for a very cheap price. It’s labelled as a Chicago pneumatic cp9160. However the seller only listed one picture and not much info. Should I be worried? Is it suitable for fossil prep? Also apart from an air compressor what else would I need to get it up and running? Thanks in advance

I've found a used Chicago cp9160 on Amazon listed at 61.55USD. It's one of the models I've been looking at and seems useful for bulk removal of matrix. But! I can't figure out if I can set in new needle or if there are different ones like chisle shaped! Where would I get accessories (couldn't find one on what I think is Chicago's website) and what price do new needles usually run at? Also wondering if this is a good buy? (it's the red one if you filter for used air scribe on Amazon). Would you recommend it to a newbie with no experience? (I have plenty of air compressors so that won't be a problem).

I bought a new Chicago Pneumatic CP9160 engraver tool from Amazon last October. It works/worked very well for removing matrix. When I first got it, I didn't have an air drying system on my compressor, so I made sure to add a few drops of air tool oil each time I used it (per the manual). A month or two ago I added an air dryer (http://amzn.com/B00OJX6CJ2) to the system. Because of that, and the fact that the scribe kept blowing dirty oil onto the fossils (yuck!), I stopped adding oil. I typically use the scribe only once a week or so, and only for perhaps an hour, but even with that light usage, it should long since have blown the residual oil out! But it hasn't - I still get oil spatters on my specimens, as well as leakage around the O-ring. This weekend when I tried using the scribe, it would barely start up - air would flow through, but the oscillations wouldn't start on their own. If I tapped the tip on a hard surface a few times it would eventually start up, but not always at full strokes per minute. And it would just abruptly stop very often. So I guess my questions are: Do others use these with an airline oiler constantly providing oil, or even just add drops as I was doing? If you do use oil, how do you keep it from spraying all over your fossils? Is it reasonable to run it with dried air and little or no oil? Have I ruined my scribe by stopping oiling each session, even though it clearly still has oil that it's spitting out? I'll be sending it in for repair, hopefully under warranty, but I'm a bit frustrated and wondered what others have experienced with this model and oil. Thanks.