Category: Fountain Pens

Posted in Fountain Pens

Thoughts on Currently Inked Pens (1)

Posted on by Charlie

A lot of fountain pen YouTube videos I watch are “currently inked” videos in which the person filming talks about the pen and ink combinations they are going to use in the coming month or what they have used in the past month. The number of pens and inks an individual might use in a month is mind boggling to me until I remember that I just don’t physically write as much as I used to.

I don’t make videos but I can blog about my thoughts on the pens I currently have ink in and how I think the pairing of ink and pen work for me. Because I have more than a few pens and I do plan on acquiring more ink samples and occasional bottle I think this will become a series. I doubt that it will be even close to monthly let alone weekly but it will be recurring over time.

And with that let’s get into the fountain pens I currently have inked as of today.

Three of the four pens I own are in the pen case. The black pen is on loan.

Currently I have a total of five fountain pens inked up. Four of them are my own and one is on loan for me to test.

  • Pilot Vanishing Point with a medium <M> nib is inked with Diamine Syrah. (On loan)
  • Lamy Al-Star with an Extra Fine <EF> nib also inked with Diamine Syrah.
  • Platinum Preppy Wa with a Fine <F> nib is inked with a Platinum Black ink cartridge.
  • Hong Dian LT N23 (Year of the Rabbit) with an Extra Fine <EF> nib is inked with Pilot Iroshizuku Ka-Jaku
  • Retro 51 Lincoln with a Fine <F> nib is inked with Noodler’s Heart of Darkness. (Not pictured as it’s in my purse.)
Four inks for five pens.

I’ll start with the Pilot Vanishing Point first by saying that it took me a few days to recover from the amazement of being offered to try this pen out. Generally speaking I don’t know many fountain pen users that will loan out their pens. Especially the more “expensive” ones. The mere idea of having it returned damaged in some way is a strong deterrent for most. I am very grateful to the person that decided that they trust me to not damage their fountain pen. (It has pretty much stayed on my desk this entire time I’ve been testing it.)

If I had a wish list of pens the Vanishing Point is not on it. I would say I was more curious about the pen. It has the form factor of a clicker pen most associated with ball points or roller balls. In essence it retracts the entire filling mechanism and nib back into the body of the pen and a little flap seals the pen from drying out. If you don’t like messing with caps or like the feel of clicker pens you might enjoy using this pen. Over the last few weeks while sitting at my desk I used the Pilot Vanishing Point to take notes, practice hand writing via transcription of some poems and generally wrote on a variety of different papers. I had minor issues filling the pen with ink – it was difficult to gauge how far I had to dip the nib into the bottle and it didn’t seem to want to pull ink into the ink chamber. The combination of Diamine Ink Syrah and this pen might not be the best pairing. No matter what paper I wrote the ink flow was relatively smooth but the nib gave me feedback and squeaked continuously. I didn’t have an issue with the weight of the pen though it did take a little time to adjust my writing as the pen kept wanting to roll in my fingers even with the clip as guide to hold it. Could this have contributed to the squeakiness of the nib and the feedback? Possibly. If I reink the pen with a Pilot ink and the writing experience is the same then it would be highly likely.

I really like writing with my Lamy Al-Star. It’s a smooth writer and it plays well with all the inks I’ve used in it so far. My preferred method of inking Lamy pens is via cartridge. I take an cleaned out empty Lamy cartridge and syringe fill it with ink. While I had no real qualms with pairing Syrah with this pen – it wrote beautifully when I used it. I did find myself wishing I was using a medium nib instead. I think perhaps this was because of my experience with the Pilot Vanishing Point’s medium nib. Lamy makes it very easy to change nibs on most their pens and getting an additional nib isn’t that expensive. I was in the process of putting a medium nib on my wish list for a future purchase when I remembered I also own a Lamy Safari. I dug the Safari out of my pen box and checked the nib size because I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. It was a medium. I looked up a reference video on how to change Lamy nibs so I wouldn’t make a mistake and proceeded to swap the nibs. The Lamy Al-Star didn’t skip a line and writes exactly like I want with Syrah and a medium nib. This was my first foray into nib swapping and while I realize not all pen brands swap nibs as easily as Lamy, I’m glad my experience went well.

The Lamy Safari on the left now has the the EF nib (silver) and the Lamy Al-Star has the M nib (black).

I haven’t decided if I like the Platinum Preppy Wa. When I first put the ink cartridge in and started writing it worked well enough. But when I picked it up a second and third time it was nothing but hard starts and skips. As I’ve continued to use the pen it has somewhat improved ink flow but still skips more than I would like. I can’t say much about the ink itself. It’s a standard black as far as I can tell. Maybe once whatever kinks the Preppy has are worked out I’ll have a better picture.

I picked up the Hong Dian LT N23 Year of the Rabbit (2023) earlier this year and when it arrived I inked it up with Pilot Iroshizuku Ka-Jaku almost immediately. The nib on this fountain pen writes so smoothly and I feel like the ink is a perfect match for it. The all metal pen is on the heavier side and I would not recommend posting the cap at all. It sits comfortably in my hand and I feel like I could write with it for an extended period if needed. This is truly a delightful combination. I’d be hard pressed to fill this pen with any other ink and I am not a person that generally has to match an ink to a pen.

The Retro 51 Lincoln has only ever had Noodler’s Heart of Darkness in it. Primarily because I use it as my every day carry pen. If I am not using it at my desk for something specific it lives in my purse. Noodler’s Heart of Darkness has been my go-to black ink for several years though you wouldn’t know that looking at how much is in the bottle. It works well in the pens I’ve used it in without complaint. In the Retro 51 it has started to stall a bit but I think that’s just because I haven’t cleaned the pen recently. I just keep refilling a cartridge as needed and continue on. Recently I’ve been contemplating switching to De Atramentis Archival Black since I already own three inks from the Document ink line.

And that’s it for currently inked pens. Do you have any combinations of pens and inks that you really like right now?

Much love,

Charlie

Posted in Fountain Pens

Exploring Ink via Science

Posted on by Charlie

There are a lot of things that fountain pen users look at when choosing an ink to use. Is an ink wet or dry? [Wetter inks have a faster flow while dry inks have a slower flow and more surface tension.] They also ask about the Three S’s .Is the ink a shading ink? [A result of a fountain pen ink pooling in certain parts of a letter when writing, so that the color and saturation of the ink appears different within a single letter or word.] Does the ink sheen? [When the fountain pen ink pools another color can be seen on top of the ink, especially when looked at in different light angles using certain paper types.] And the final S – does the ink shimmer? [Fountain pen ink that has small particles of glitter mixed in.] A common aspect that is also looked at is how water resistant the ink is. [Water resistance means that a portion of the ink will remain after being subjected to water. This might only be one ingredient of the ink, leaving behind a legible remnant with little or no representation of the original color.]

My current collection of bottled ink has five shimmering inks. At least one of my inks has some shading properties and another seems to have sheening properties that are dependent on the amount of ink put on the paper. Three of my inks are highly water resistant (I’d expect so since they are document inks)

There is another aspect that of fountain pen ink that I have decided to explore. That is the chromatography.

In chemical analysis, chromatography is a laboratory technique for the separation of a mixture into its components. The mixture is dissolved in a fluid solvent called the mobile phase, which carries it through a system on which a material called the stationary phase is fixed.

Wikipedia

In the case of fountain pen inks I am looking at the varying colors that make up each ink by putting fountain pen ink on a highly absorbent piece of paper then using water as the fluid and observing the different colors in the ink separate as they travel up the paper.

For my experiment I used Chromatography Paper Strips that I purchased on Amazon. After drawing a line of ink on each strip with either an inked fountain pen or a dip pen I attached the strips to a wooden dowl that I could suspend over a small bowl of water making certain that the ink line was not submerged when the paper touched the water. I set a timer and retrieved the paper at the 1.20 minute mark and let the water to continue working its way up the paper then waited for it to dry.

Ten ink samples (7 bottle inks, 1 cartridge ink, 2 samples)

Inks Tested

Top Row

  1. Wearingeul Twelfth Night, a sliver shimmering pink ink (bottle)
  2. Diamine Firefly, a gold shimmering orange ink (bottle)
  3. Ferris Wheel Press The Fluttering Heart, a gold shimmering pink ink (bottle)
  4. Platinum Black, a standard black ink (cartridge)

Middle Row

  1. Diamine Syrah, a wine colored ink (bottle)
  2. Pilot Iroshizuku Ka-Jaku, a teal colored ink (bottle)
  3. Jacques Herbin 1670 Stormy, a gold shimmering grey ink (bottle)
  4. De Atramentis Black Currant, a scented purple ink (bottle)

Bottom Row

  1. Diamine Dark Forest, a dark green ink (sample vial)
  2. Noodler’s Ink Bad Gator Green, a green ink (sample vial)
Note: There were a few inks in my current ink collection I did not test – my document inks as I already know from a previous chromatography trial that they do not separate and a shimmering ink that I intend to give away or parse out samples from that I do not intend to use further.

My Observations and Thoughts

I really need to cultivate more patience when it comes to waiting for results. Though this test was meant to separate colors it also showed me which inks are really not water resistance as the lines completely vanished as the water progressed up the strip. The two shimmering pink inks surprised me. The Fluttering Heart leans more brown than pink when compared side by side to Wearingeul Twelfth Night and in the chromatography it seems that the difference is the addition of yellow. I was also surprised to see the yellow and pink in Stormy Grey show up.

After looking closely at the dried strips of paper it quite surprised me to find that many of the inks that seemed to fade completely from the origin line displayed very light grey. I don’t think this is an indication of color but perhaps it is an indication of the inks lubrication. I may look into this further in the future, but for now it’s just an interesting observation.

Overall I wasn’t really surprised or wowed by the results of these inks. Partially because this was my second attempt at chromatography testing with these inks and partially because I have come across some amazing chromatography examples from other pen and ink enthusiasts.

Bonus

One of the many reasons I decided to explore chromatography was that I wanted to be able to fully use up the inks that I own and one of the ways to do that is through art. I came across Nick Stewart on Instagram (quinkandbleach) and was absolutely taken with the idea of creating art using chromatography.

While this isn’t quite the paper finish that Nick recommends in his tutorials (it’s not rough or rough enough) it is the right weight of paper – 200lb. This was one of my first attempts to see if I could do chromatography swatch. It didn’t work out (in this case I really think it was the finish of the paper that made the difference.) But I like it nonetheless. You can actually see the brilliant orange and the bright pink come through in Diamine Syrah which is one of, if not absolute, my favorite inks.

Much love,

Charlie

P.S. If you happen to have ink samples you no longer need or want or are just in the habit of sharing inks with other enthusiasts let me know. I’d be happy to share from my small collection. If you use the Fountain Pen Companion you can find me under Charlie M to look at my ink collection.