W/NW Show me your nice fountain pens

dave lackey said:
But, how does one choose which size pen? Or nib, for that matter?
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I'd recommend starting with a TWSBI 580 or Classic in a medium nib, and a small bottle of ink. The 580 is a great medium-sized, medium-to-low-priced pen, and the TWSBI nibs are very nice. You can also buy extra nib units and try different sizes. If you're on a budget, try a Jinhao x750 or x450, which are really nice and cheap Chinese pens, or a Pilot Metropolitan.

Just remember that Japanese nibs run really small. A Japanese (Pilot, etc) broad is like other manufacturers' mediums, and on down the line. Japanese extra fines are crazy fine.
 
coelacanth said:
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Franklin Christoph (one of the few true American manufacturers today) Model 02 with Mike Masuyama tuned 18K stub nib, converted to an eyedropper, filled with Omas Turquoise ink.
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I've got an 02 as well, in emerald! It is a terrific pen. I recently picked up the pocket 66 as well.
 
mabelsound said:
Just remember that Japanese nibs run really small. A Japanese (Pilot, etc) broad is like other manufacturers' mediums, and on down the line. Japanese extra fines are crazy fine.
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Agreed, Japanese EF nibs are like needles! Japanese and Kanji (Chinese) characters are more complicated than Alphabets. Extra fine nib is kind of a must for writing in Chinese. Sailor Pro Gear and Eversharp Skyline are my choices for Chinese writing. I use fountain pen whenever it's available to me. It just makes writing fun.

Here's the sample of my ugly writing and pens.

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I remember writing essays in junior high school in early 1960's with a regular fountain pen, then a few years later in high school the ink pen with the replaceable cartridges appeared.......but many years later I started using the premium Waterman ball points (for the last 20 years) and the best price I could find my latest one was well over $100 - this for a writing instrument I take to work every day, use all day, and when I get home, I wipe it down with the same care I show my Leicas. But on this thread people have posted pictures of some gorgeous pens. It is nice to know that there still is an appreciation for this magnificent writing instrument.
 
I currently use two Pelikan M800s in the green translucent barrel version. But the Parker 51 is special too. I just prefer the EF nibs of the Pelikans, at the moment. The Parker 51 is the Citroen DS of pens. Its pneumatic shapes, gently tapering barrel towards the waist where it meets the cap, and the cap of perfect proportions make it a wonderful object to see and to hold. I have two, burgundy and steel cap, and a grey and gold cap.
 
Most of us around my age used fountain pens all through school. I never got over my love for them and style of writing with them.

I have a couple of these, Parker Vacumatic pens that I really love using. This is a third quarter production 1946. I have one that was my fathers too but don't remember the date. I believe it was a late 30's.

The vacumatics had a solid gold nib and the back cap unscrewed revealing a plunger that was used to fill the bladder.

When I became interested in pens many fine pens could be purchased for under $15 in junk and antique shops. Many had damaged nibs and dry bladders but the ones with dry bladders could be fixed for a dollar or so. Rubber bladders are cheap and in most cases only take a little time to replace. Soaking the nib in dilute dish washing detergent clears the old dried ink. I think I paid $10 for this one and replaced the bladder. It's an excellent writing pen perfect for every day use. I've found some pens are finicky about the kind of ink but never had an issue with a Parker or Schaffer.

The last photo is how you tell a person uses a fountain pen.
 

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mabelsound,

Ohh. I've been thinking about the Pocket 66. It will be great eyedropper with super clean look (and easy to clean) and it won't be a huge gobbler like 02. Very tempting. Got any pics?

Larry,
Well, the thread is totally backfiring at myself as well so there. We all fall together!

Like Juju said, Japanese pens got noticeably finer nibs for the designation. I'm a Japanese but I don't write Japanese almost at all as I live and work in the US. Most of my fountain pens are from Europe and I like broader nibs for their characteristics and the shades you can see in the ink. When I do write Japanese (e.g. writing a letter to my folks in Japan), I struggle to write clearly as Kanji characters are too complex for European M/B nibs. One good thing is that I can hide my horrible Japanese writing a bit in the puddle of ink. 😉

I'm a product designer/creative director and I use fountain pen pretty much exclusively for memo taking, todo management, idea sketches, etc every single day. In fact I don't remember the last time I used non-FP in my daily life. I feel fountain pens are decisively better writing experience than ballpoint pens IMHO. It's like SLR vs RF, digital vs film thing maybe, and there is no one right answer. But if you never used fountain pen or stopped using long time ago, I think it's worth a look.

BTW, I just came back from a week long work trip to east coast Canada, and I flew with 2 fountain pens, and flew back with 3. No leaks (there are a few simple rules to follow) and they worked great for dozens of meetings and design/production jobs.
 
Pelikan 400NN Tortoise-Shell from late 1950s - mid 1960s. Its 14 karat gold oblique nib has been tuned by Richard Binder (what they call "Binderized").

Super smooth writer, currently filled with Noodler's Cayenne ink.

Shown with its German friends from the same era.
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My daughter gat married in Mexico this spring and I bought this Faber Castell in a Mexico City department store as a souvenir of this grand occasion. Not a very expensive pen but a great writer, I am very happy with it.
 

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Very nice MISH!

Here are my Kaweco Sport Trio.
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Top to bottom:
Ice Sport Yellow, M nib (eyedropper conversion)
Brass Sport, B nib (Kaweco Squeeze converter)
Art Sport Alabaster, BB nib (eyedropper conversion)
 
coelacanth said:
Very nice MISH!

Here are my Kaweco Sport Trio.
Top to bottom:
Ice Sport Yellow, M nib (eyedropper conversion)
Brass Sport, B nib (Kaweco Squeeze converter)
Art Sport Alabaster, BB nib (eyedropper conversion)
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Oy vey, that Brass Sport is gorgeous! Please tell me more about the writing quality and feel (because I feel it is in my future....)
 
Saul said:
Oy vey, that Brass Sport is gorgeous! Please tell me more about the writing quality and feel (because I feel it is in my future....)
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I love this little (and heavy) thing. Patina on brass (or let's just say the whole new level of Brassing) is really oh so lovely. If you want the clean and shiny look back then you can polish it, but I'm just keeping it as-is. This pen is fairly new to me but I also have a Liliput in brass (which is MIA 🙁) and I love how it's been aging.

I took it to my recent business trip (4 flights round trip) and had absolutely no leak with the Kaweco converter, and I usually use it with squeeze type converter. It's my pocket pen for signing receipts, quick jotting, etc.

I have their steel nib in broad, and it writes very very well. Good flow, fairly wet and no skipping or toothy feel. For a steel nib sold for $10 (accessary nib unit), I have absolutely no complain. Being a steel nib, it doesn't have much of flex, but it has a subtle stub-like quality you can show some line variation by the stroke angle.

I do hear really good things about Kaweco's new 14K gold nibs. Good thing about this pen is that you can easily unscrew and swap nibs super easily, including those gold ones.

Note that some Sport pens (Classic, Ice, maybe the most standard looking ones) have friction fit nibs, while Kaweco sells swappable nibs with section installed (or you can yank nib unit out of section), it's not as easy as those screw-in ones. In my collection of three, Art and Brass got screw-in nibs (that they call 060), and the Ice (basically the same as the Classic) has friction fit. I'm using both the Ice and Art as eyedropper and got no leak or burp so far. (knocking on wood)

For the Brass specifically, it's not eyedropper recommended as the whole pen other than the nib unit is made of raw brass.

I'll take a photo of some writing samples sometime soon. 😉
 
coelacanth said:
I love this little (and heavy) thing. Patina on brass (or let's just say the whole new level of Brassing) is really oh so lovely. If you want the clean and shiny look back then you can polish it, but I'm just keeping it as-is. This pen is fairly new to me but I also have a Liliput in brass (which is MIA 🙁) and I love how it's been aging.

I took it to my recent business trip (4 flights round trip) and had absolutely no leak with the Kaweco converter, and I usually use it with squeeze type converter. It's my pocket pen for signing receipts, quick jotting, etc.

I have their steel nib in broad, and it writes very very well. Good flow, fairly wet and no skipping or toothy feel. For a steel nib sold for $10 (accessary nib unit), I have absolutely no complain. Being a steel nib, it doesn't have much of flex, but it has a subtle stub-like quality you can show some line variation by the stroke angle.

I do hear really good things about Kaweco's new 14K gold nibs. Good thing about this pen is that you can easily unscrew and swap nibs super easily, including those gold ones.

Note that some Sport pens (Classic, Ice, maybe the most standard looking ones) have friction fit nibs, while Kaweco sells swappable nibs with section installed (or you can yank nib unit out of section), it's not as easy as those screw-in ones. In my collection of three, Art and Brass got screw-in nibs (that they call 060), and the Ice (basically the same as the Classic) has friction fit. I'm using both the Ice and Art as eyedropper and got no leak or burp so far. (knocking on wood)

For the Brass specifically, it's not eyedropper recommended as the whole pen other than the nib unit is made of raw brass.

I'll take a photo of some writing samples sometime soon. 😉
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Thanks for that detailed response. I looked for the gold nib replacement on line but at that price the steel will suit me fine, especially since I don't yet have such a nuanced understanding of nibs and flex. But I have to order that pen because it hits all the right obsessive, fetishistic qualities I look for in object (and will complement a solid-copper roller ball I recently bought. As others have pointed out, this thread is deadly but unavoidable once you get in.
 
Two very different beasts.

Two very different beasts.

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My first fountain pen, a Sheaffer school pen from about 1967, and my latest, an English Croxley Dickinson pen from about 1946. Both are good writers.
 
lol ok

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Left to right

Lamy Safari
Lamy CP1
Pelikan unknown (i think it's a 250)
Lamy Safari demonstrator
Lamy Safari demonstrator
Esterbrook (model unknown)
Lamy AL-star
Parker 51
TWSBI demonstrator
Parker unknown (similar to an IM?)
Kreko (model unknown)
Lamy AL-star
Namiki Decimo

I use a couple different kinds of inks. Most of the nibs are F or EF. I really, really like the Iroshizuku inks (asa-gao and momiji). Montblanc blue is a longtime standard. I've got a nice Diamine green-black, a Noodler's Apache, Waterrman Red and an old Parker Ruby Red (my ex almost threw it out. lol) loaded in various pens at the moment. And, in the Pelikan, the last of my great and now out-of-manufacture Sailor Red-Brown.

The Pelikan was my first real pen. The unknown Parker dates to adolescence, and the 51 was my dad's. The Pelikan is silk. I've used it all over the world, and it's never leaked on a plane (while capped). It's probably my favorite of them all. I'd love to buy a slightly bigger version, since I won't write with the cap posted and the pen is a teeeeeeny bit short for me, but it's $400 or $500 and is not an impulse purchase.

The Namiki is amazing, and it gets a lot of use. It's super practical. The Decimo is the slightly slimmer version of the Vanishing Point. Next pen I buy will probably be the matte black VP. NOTE - these require an almost brush-like grip, writing with the very bottom of the nib.

The TWSBI is an amazing pen, particularly for the price. It fits and balances extraordinarly well.

The Parker 51 was a find in a box of my dad's. I paid $100 to have it rejuvenated (the bladder sac tends to go bad after a while - 40 years in a box was definitely a while) and it's great. A little scratchy at times, but mostly lovely.

The Lamy AL-Star and Safari are basically the same pen, just aluminum vs plastic barrels. I can't say enough great things about these pens. They're insanely cheap, totally durable, and they write very, very smoothly. They also take adjustment very well. Lots of use.

The other Lamy doesn't see a lot of use. It's too short for me.

The vintage green pens were bought at a lawn sale in LA. Cheap and OK but don't see much use.

ADJUSTMENT NOTE

A lot of pens are "scratchy" or "wet", and the nibs can be adjusted pretty easily. If you tinker with cameras, pens are kind of in the same line of reasoning. I won't touch the Pelikan, though, or, really, the 51 aside from running a brass shim through the nib to clean it. The other ones have pretty much all been worked on till I adore them. Adjustment includes smoothing out with a series of ever-finer emery boards and then widening or narrowing the nib gap. Somewhere in there, you need to align the nib tines so they're sitting right together. An 8x loupe (which I'm sure many of you have already) or a 30x lighted loupe can reveal obvious quick fixes. There are youtube videos and internet resources galore about how to do this. I recommend learning on a cheap pen with a replaceable nib (Lamy nibs are $5). Undoing is harder than doing. I'm not confident enough to do much to the fancy pens.
 
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