Guest Post - A Good, But Not Perfect, Fix for Missing Poppers - Alan

For those of you that like buying some of the older Filofax organisers off Ebay and other sales sites the occasional 'missing popper' will be familiar to you all. 

Thank you to Alan for this excellent guide on how to fix them. 

I have posted about this before in various of the Facebook groups, but Facebook is not a great platform for archiving articles that could be a useful reference some time down the road.  So at the risk of being repetitive, here is how I deal with missing popper caps.

While taking pictures for another guest post about my collection of Deskfax Filofax, I noticed that the popper cap was missing from the Deskfax that stays open on my desk.

Naturally, I decided to fix it. My “fix” – or “Filofix”, as KentfromOz would say – is to use the head off of a brass fastener. These are getting harder to find these days, and I had to special order them. Since I only expected to use the caps, I ordered the smallest length, one inch, as the price goes up dramatically with longer pins.

The heads come off the fasteners fairly easily. I find that spreading the two pins, as shown below, and then pinching together near the head allows the brass head to slip off easily.

These heads are the perfect size to fit over the remaining part of the popper hardware, provided that it hasn’t become too damaged.  In my experience, most of the time they stay on well, but occasionally, I have had the odd popper head slip off. I imagine that a dab from a hot glue gun would make the fix more permanent, but I have never done this, as it is my intention to try painting the brass heads in their correct colour.

Here is a picture of some of my vintage personal size Filofaxes that I have fixed.

Earlier, I mentioned that I had bought the shortest size of these brass fasteners.  One day, I wanted to use a couple of personal Filofax that I had been using for an earlier course, and instead of finding an unused binder for the old contents, I pulled out the brass fasteners.

As you can see from the picture, the one inch fastener barely makes it through the thickness of the contents of a personal. A longer fastener would have been more useful!

Thank you Alan.