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My Fountain Pens

[Pictures to come… eventually.]

I seem to prefer nibs around the Medium range (thick Fines and thin Broads included) and have come to like larger nibs (e.g. #6 Jowo) and thicker pens over slimmer and smaller ones. I don’t really have a preference for pen material or visual flairs, a pen just has to look nice to me.

After about 5-6 years “involved” in the fountain pen hobby (I call it a hobby because of the amount of time spent engaging with aspects of it such as the community, pen maintenance, research and so on for pleasure) I’ve stopped really wanting new pens and, in fact, would prefer to slim down my collection to a maximum of 6 pens (that’s the size of my pen pouch). Once I figured out what I want and have a good selection that satisfies me, I found that the drive to try new things faded. I just don’t need more than what I have.

Current Collection

Very good value for money. A nice, big ink reservoir coupled with an Extra-Fine nib carried me through my first-year university exams on one fill. It writes well, comes with basic tools that you’d need to maintain it (a wrench and some silicon grease for if the piston gets a bit gummed up and some spare O-rings), and is an excellent daily-driver.

This is also a really nice pen. The vacuum filling mechanism is fun to use, it writes really well, and also comes with maintenance tools just like the Eco. It feels well-built and looks really nice too.

This is probably my favourite pen. I originally bought it with a Fine nib but later got a black-coloured Medium nib from Franklin-Christoph because I found the Fine that came with it to be a bit dry for my tastes. Because this is an “eyedropper” pen, it’s super easy to clean and holds a massive amount of ink. Much like the Vac700R, it also allows you to stop ink flow by screwing in the cap so you can confidently take it full of ink on flights and not have to worry about ink explosions. Since getting the new nib I love the way it writes, I love how large and comfortable it is to hold, I love that it’s clear so you can see the ink sloshing around inside, and I love how simple and easy it is as a package.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this pen. On one hand, the design is really nice, the nib writes very well when holding it right, and the piston mechanism is smooth. The whole thing feels quality. The worst part about it is the nib though. It tends to only write well at weirdly steep angles and experiences baby-bottom at more “normal” writing angles. I like the pen for non-cursive writing but I don’t write with it often because of its quirkiness. I will probably need to send it to a nib grinder to get it ground to something a bit nicer.

This is a really nice pen. It has a full metal body which, while heavy, also feels very nice to hold, the design is beautiful, and the nib writes extremely well. It’s a simple standard international cartridge-converter pen so there’s nothing complicated about it, it’s just a really nice writing instrument that looks gorgeous.

This pen was made in Canada in 1941 and was professionally restored before I bought it. The Medium nib writes more like a modern Fine, but that doesn’t bother me as I knew that before buying. This pen is a bit on the smaller side for my hands, but it’s always very enjoyable to write with. The pen looks great, feels fluid in the hand, and is super reliable. The only thing I dislike is that it’s kind of hard to clean it well because of the ink bladder system, but this is quite common in vintage pens and I keep it inked up with one specific ink all the time (Waterman Inspired Blue), so I only clean it when I plan to not use it for a while.

This was a pen I wanted for a long time before finally grabbing it when it came in stock on the Franklin-Christoph website. I adore this pen. It feels so good to hold, is not inconvenient to post when needed because of the tapered body, and the nib is amazing. It’s smooth yet makes sharp, varied lines and feels great to write with. The pen is also really nice to look at with its sparkly smoke-grey finial and (internally) textured ice-like body.

This pen is made entirely from aluminium and is totally solid. Given that it’s small, it’s not tiresome to hold for long periods of time and the grip doesn’t get fingerprinty and slippery because it’s not shiny metal. It’s a really nice pen that I used extensively during my food industry job and has survived countless drops onto concrete and tile flooring (capped, of course). I took the nib from a Faber-Castell Ambition and plopped it into this thing (surprisingly, it fit) and now it writes like a dream too. (Not that the nib it came with was bad; it was just average.)

This is a super compact pocket pen. It doesn’t have a clip and you’re meant to post it when writing to extend it to the length of a full pen. This colour is also a really pretty, almost brown-soda-bottle colour with a textured inside and clear finials. My only issue with this pen is the nib. I don’t really like the 1.1mm stub and I find it has a lot of false starts. I don’t know how much of that is really a result of my tinkering, but I’m going to eventually grab a replacement nib for it that fits my preferences better.

Other Pens

I have used some other pens in the past. Namely:

The Jinhao X450 was the first fountain pen I had. It was something like $10 on Amazon and was what I bought when I wanted to be “fancy” (along with a gaudy gold pocket watch… don’t ask). It honestly wasn’t a terrible pen for the money. It wrote pretty well, though it was obviously cheaply made. It was a good pen to learn the ins-and-outs of fountain pen use and tinkering.

The Nemosine pens were decent albeit cheap pens, but I didn’t like how heavy the Fission was and the Singularity felt a bit too plastic-y and cheap. I gave these away to people who wanted to try out fountain pens.

The Lamy Logo is not terrible, but far too expensive for what you get. The brushed steel finish started wearing quickly and Lamy is not known for consistent nib sizes; my Fine nib wrote more on the Broad end of Medium. I simply don’t use this pen anymore because I have others that are much nicer to use.

The Faber-Castell Ambition gave me issues after a few months of ownership. The cap became noticeably loose and the pen would dry out quickly even when capped. I attempted a repair on the cap by heating it up, softening the plastic liner and re-forming it to fit around the pen when capped which did work to snug up the cap, but the pen still had frustrating drying issues. While this was a nice pen overall (minus the cap being quite a bit too heavy), I eventually gave up and harvested the really nice nib for my Fountain K and kept the converter as a spare.

The Pilot Varsity pens are known for being extremely cheap yet surprisingly good pens. I bought a pack and kept them for handing out to people who wanted to try out fountain pens on their own and can indeed confirm that they are excellent value for their money.