EPTTsukiyo is probably my all time favorite ink colour.
Fountain Pens - Page 25
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Cambium
United States16368 Posts
Tsukiyo is probably my all time favorite ink colour. | ||
peanuts
United States1224 Posts
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salle
Sweden5552 Posts
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Simberto
Germany10821 Posts
Fountain Pens are rather common here in Germany, at least in school it is usually expected that each student has one. However, they tend to be only of the variety that uses ink cartridges to fill them. Since i haven't seen any mention of this in the thread, and a lot of talk about ink bottles, i am wondering if this is just a German thing, or if it is a thing restricted to the lower quality pens one would use in school? | ||
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salle
Sweden5552 Posts
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peanuts
United States1224 Posts
Most of the lower end pens do have cartridges, but some nicer ones do as well. There are refillable cartridges like Salle alluded to. If they aren't offered by the manufacturer, you can almost always get them third party it seems. | ||
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aseq
Netherlands3901 Posts
On July 08 2015 00:24 peanuts wrote: Oh jesus Christ, I've spent $30 on a fucking pen. What am I doing with myself? Most of the lower end pens do have cartridges, but some nicer ones do as well. There are refillable cartridges like Salle alluded to. If they aren't offered by the manufacturer, you can almost always get them third party it seems. That's fine. $30 is a good amount for a pen too if you're starting out. No so cheap it'll be crap but not so expensive the money's wasted. Did you check some guide on what to buy (and what did you get  )? | ||
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Mordanis
United States893 Posts
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peanuts
United States1224 Posts
On July 08 2015 00:39 aseq wrote: That's fine. $30 is a good amount for a pen too if you're starting out. No so cheap it'll be crap but not so expensive the money's wasted. Did you check some guide on what to buy (and what did you get )?Lamy Safari. Solid construction, better weight than the Preppies. I checked the Reddit guide and the TL guide and it seemed to be a logical starting point. | ||
Firebolt145
Lalalaland34397 Posts
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peanuts
United States1224 Posts
Still trying to learn the optimal pressure/angle to write with, but when I hit it, it feels perfect. Feels like a brush, perfect translation of movement to the page. | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
On July 11 2015 02:06 peanuts wrote: Holy shit, this is so much better than any ballpoint. Still trying to learn the optimal pressure/angle to write with, but when I hit it, it feels perfect. Feels like a brush, perfect translation of movement to the page. It would be even softer if you used it on fancy Clairefontaine paper (which I assume you are not using). But when you get to that, it gets really expensive .Still I have a few Rhodia/Clairefontaine/Moleskin notebooks that I use to keep track of stuff and I also have some cheap notebooks and sometimes with the cheap paper I can really feel the pen catching ever so slightly in the paper fibers. And even when it doesn't, the more expensive paper is just softer. Love it. Anyhow I recently picked up a Platinum 3776, not bad. I made the mistake of taking a "fine", which apparently is the equivalent of an European extra fine... A bit disappointed to be honest, it's a bit too fine for my liking and while it's not "scratchy" it's a bit too rough for my liking due to the size. I still prefer my Parker Sonnet and my Lamy Safari for writing  | ||
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Thouhastmail
Korea (North)876 Posts
*Aurora black ink is the best one so far, but it's a bit too fluid. | ||
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Firebolt145
Lalalaland34397 Posts
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TheEmulator
28005 Posts
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Firebolt145
Lalalaland34397 Posts
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Thouhastmail
Korea (North)876 Posts
Edit: My first pen was m200 and it's the best choice for my first. Maybe you can start with that one. | ||
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Firebolt145
Lalalaland34397 Posts
In terms of starters, I'd recommend preppy if you only want to spent a couple dollars, or a Lamy Safari if you're spending ~20-30 dollars. M200 is like $75 so that's probably the one you'd buy next. | ||
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Thouhastmail
Korea (North)876 Posts
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/KmjyJgi.jpg) | ||
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Honeybadger
United States821 Posts
My collection of FP's and inks is getting kind of extreme. I recently bought my first "grail pen", the $700 Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age in Extra Fine. The nib is 23k palladium and very soft (not really a flex nib but it will give a lot of line variation) and the body is made of crushed and stabalized basaltic lava rock from Mt Etna in Italy. Also into classics like parker vacumatics with the stacked celluloid and a semiflex nib, and a scheaffer statesman with the rube goldberg snorkel filler and palladium silver nib in absolute needlepoint I'm even having a prewar japanese eyedropper restored soon. My mom pulled it off of a sunken japanese battleship in the 1970's, and it's still in usable condition, after 30 years underwater and another 40 in a box. For newbies, I usually carry 4 or 5 platinum preppies converted to eyedropper and filled with some kind of exciting ink. If they express interest in my pen, I just toss them one for free. About $3 each, $0.05 of ink and a $0.12 o ring, it's hardly any skin off my back, and has converted several people into users. I usually recommend people buy the pilot metro first since it's only $12 that comes with a cartridge, a converter for bottled ink, and a really tough, well designed body. I don't love the grip section, so if someone is willing to spend about $16 and is really down with the idea of bottled ink, I actually point people to a chinese pen now, the piston-fill Wing Sung 698. It even has identical nib/feed to pilot's steel lines, so a pilot plumix 1.0 stub or a pilot M, F, or EF (from the $5 penmanship, another great entry level pen that comes with a cartridge) will all swap right in. I have a lot of pens, and I find something captivating about the little 698. It only has one flaw in my eyes, the cap doesn't post on the back. But you can see the ink sloshing around, it holds a TON, isn't prone to drying out, and is overall just really nice to hold and use. Get it on ebay for about $16. If someone is willing to spend $40, the faber castell loom is pretty much a perfect writing instrument. You have to spend an extra $5 on a converter, but it takes bottled ink, short or long standard cartridges, is perfectly weighted, with an amazing sprung clip, and the nib is nothing short of a work of art. it blows every other steel nib I've ever used out of the water. it's got this delightful, deliberate feedback, like perfectly tuned suspension on a sports car, not too harsh, but you feel the texture of the paper. Nothing else I own writes like it. It doesn't flex whatsoever, but it's incredible, and for normal writing, it's the yardstick I use. It only has one drawback, it's a little weird looking. Get a colored cap (I like blue) and toss some matching ink into it. Skip the lamy safari. it's a good pen but just doesn't stack up anymore for the price. If you like the style, get the al-star, which is aluminum and more in line with the asking price. But these days, fountain pens are simply of a much higher quality, and the lamy Z50 steel nib (the nib that the studio, safari, al-star, joy, CP1, logo and LX use) is just not as good as it used to seem. Particularly with the EF and F nibs, their quality control is getting rather lax. If you want a pen in the $28-30 range, the pen that kills the lamy in every way (cheaper, better made, better writing, more solid, takes a standard #5 nib so you can have anything from an EF to 1.1 stub from them or up to an oblique double broad from knox on amazon) is the TWSBI Eco. Piston fill, fantastic build quality. I still prefer the $16 Wing Sung 698, but TWSBI is an established brand with incredible products. I have a VAC700R that I like so much, I spent $150 on a custom flexible gold nib for it. for the vac and 580/classic pens, they even make custom ink bottles to fill them from. As for the first step into gold nibs, if you only have $35-45, you can get a platinum PTL5000A or Pilot Seremo on amazon, which both write with honest-to-god gold nibs. Boring looking pens with tiny nibs (they obviously have to save money when they're giving you a real gold nib) both are fairly soft and slightly toothy. If you have $65-75, Amazon will sell you a Platinum 3776 Century. I like the soft fine, since platinum's other nibs are hard as nails, kind of defeating the point of gold. It uses platinum-proprietary converters and cartridges, and is made from a pretty nice plastic. The Cap has an inner seal that is designed to keep the nib wet for over a year without use. The pilot Custom 74 and 91 are both good too, but just not as pretty. As for a first bottle of ink, I recommend sailor Yama-Dori, a dark green turquoise that, on decent paper, will sheen to a vivid red. I also like Noodlers black swan in australian roses, a semi-waterproof/archival ink that is a dark, dusky purple/red that shades like mad. noodlers Apache Sunset is one of the most vivid shading inks in existance, changing colors from yellow to orange-red. If you want to look into vintage pens, check out Nathaniel Cerf at Thepenmarket. He completely restores vintage pens, documents ANY flaws meticulously, and sells them at pretty outrageous prices. He doesn't deal in the super expensive stuff like flexy waterman 52's or parker vacumatics, but I got a completely restored (and this pen takes like 40 minutes just to take apart) 1950's scheaffer statesman snorkel for $85 in like-new condition, a well loved but perfect writing scheaffer Craftsman from the 1940's with an awesome gold nib for $45, and a rare American Pencil Co. Venus with a gold nib for $35. Inks are a whole other can of worms. I have about 90 inks now. Sailor inks are pretty much all perfect. Some inks really suck on cheap paper, and pretty much none are as well behaved as Sailor. Sailor inks also have the benefit of most having a heavy sheen and/or shading on good paper. Noodlers also makes a ton of cool colors with interesting effects. warden inks are immune to any and all known forms of counterfeit, including lasers (his standard bulletproof inks are immune to all but lasers) his inks can be archival (never fade) freeze resistant (polar) resistant to feathering (x feather) copies of WW2 air-mail inks, he even got a bottle of ink that was verified as being from Los Alamos during the manhatten project (they used a very specific black) and reverse engineered it completely, called dark matter. He also sells the highest contrast ink currently made, Baystate Blue, which you should just dedicate a pen to, because it stains clear plastic and will literally coagulate any normal inks it touches. When you get a 4.5oz bottle of noodlers ink, you get one of his "charlie" pens for free. These are amazing little eyedropper fillers that he created and gives away as a response to the 2015 paris attacks. When you get one, pull the nib/feed straight out, wash them with soapy water, and return them. Then dip the nib/feed in boiling water for ~15 seconds and then tightly squeeze the two together for 30-40 seconds. The feed is ebonite, a vulcanized rubber, and must be heat set to prevent it burping ink. But the charlie is a spectacular little writer. Other good inks are shimmering inks that have pearlescent effects. get a bottle of J. Herbin 1670 Emerald of Chivor and enjoy. Once you're familiar with pens, I highly recommend the noodlers ahab and konrad. You can swap any #6 nib into them, replacing the flex nib for a stub, extra fine, whatever. The Ahab is a little more versatile, you can use the piston converter, eyedropper convert it, or use noodlers 308 refillable cartridges. The konrad is slimmer and uses a simple piston mechanism. For a cheap "wet noodle" flex pen, buy a box of Zebra comic G dip pen nibs and a noodlers ahab/konrad. Take pliers and BARELY squeeze the ass end of the nib and it should fit right onto the feed. Same as the charlie pen, dip it in hot water and squeeze together, and you have a nib that puts a $500 waterman wet noodle to shame. You just have to pull the nib and keep it separate from the pen if you plan on leaving it for more than a few days without use, since it's a super springy carbon steel, it will rust. Once you decide you want to use an FP, get some proper paper. Rhodia, Clairefontaine, tomoe river, mnemosyne are the most common. Rhodia and clairefontaine are the two easy to find ones, with rhodia a little more textured and clairefontaine a little smoother. You also have line options more than lines and graph. Dot grid, french ruled, blank. Good paper keeps the ink from penetrating into and through the other side, letting you write double sided. It seems a little pricey dropping $8 on a single notebook, but once you just feel your hand on the page you'll understand. Good paper is where inks with sheen and shading really show up. Copy paper, moleskine, and cheap mead notebooks simply absorb the ink, which does make it super fast drying (moleskine is kind of ideal for lefties, and I also suggest noodlers bernake blue and black since they're made to dry near-instantly. Also stick with finer nibs.) but feathers out and kills any depth of color. If you need to write on cheap copy paper, I again recommend sailor inks since they tend to resist penetrating and feathering, and stick with extra fine nibs. I have two lamy 2000's, one F and one EF, the EF is just for work since I'm a medic and can't choose the paper that my patient charts are printed on. If you're new to fountain pens, the place I recommend most for advice (they're happy to help you decide) and education is Goulet Pens. | ||
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