This is almost certainly a late 1940s model, though maybe early 50s. The lever fills were phased out for all but black after the war. Re-sacced this one many years ago, IIRC with the polysac out of a Sheaffer converter, but I’m not inclined to crack it open to verify. Conical 14K triumph nib in a western F/M. Smooth with a hint of feedback, and no flex whatsoever. This was a thoroughly midrange offering, meant to be used daily. It slotted in between the Admiral and Craftsman below it, and several models and trims above it. The 1/4” gold fill band is the giveaway. The nib is STOUT, and the gold fill on the clip and band has held up beautifully.

They were not fucking around with these pens. Even this one retailed for around ten bucks in 1949, making it an $80-100 pen today, roughly equivalent to the cheapest solid gold nib pens from major makers today, funnily enough. Really though, general purchasing power inflation is a weird analogue in this product category, which changed so drastically in the 60s and 70s.

Alright, kiddos. Play time is over. And by "over," I specifically mean the opposite of that, and it's time to play with pens and photography equipment.

So today I got out four things, if we're counting. Thing one is my illuminated photo box. That's right, this time y'all get to float in the Infinite Expanse. And two stacked macro focus shots. Luxury!

Thing two is the Platinum Curidas, with a medium point and in "Urban Green" which is really more of a translucent turquoise. The Curidas I think at the moment is my favorite retractable fountain pen -- admittedly, out of an available selection of not very many. Other contenders I can think of off the top of my head are the Pilot/Namiki Vanishing Point and Decimo, which I have; the Mahjohn A2 Press, which I also have; The Lamy Dialog, which I don't. Oh, and also these things, which are ubiquitous, but crap. Jury's out on the Oaso K016, which I haven't seen in person yet. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I have one of those coming in the mail already.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

Here's the Curidas' party trick:

It goes blep. It goes un-blep. Click the rather long plunger on the tail and the point retracts into the body. A trap door closes over it, obviating the need for a cap.

Platinum make a lot of noise about the Curidas being the successor to their "Knock" pen from the 1950's, which is now an utter hen's tooth. You're unlikely to get your hands on one of those.

If you're a habitual disassembler, the Curidas has you covered. It breaks down into this selection of components (and you can pull the spring out as well). The clip is removable and my pen came with a little tool in the box to assist with this, which wasn't immediately evident because all the instructions were in Japanese.

The engineers who designed this are surely showing off, because it has not one but two bolt action mechanisms inside, both of which are arguably unnecessary. The first is the bolt-and-twist to remove the metal sheath over the cartridge:

And the second is another bolt-and-twist to insert or remove the nib/cartridge/feed assembly into the nose of the pen:

Never mind the coin. I was just using it to keep the round parts from rolling away.

The nib is steel and it's pretty stiff. Very little of its length is not supported by the feed beneath. If you like a flexy bendy line-width-changy feel the Curidas is probably not for you. The "medium" nib is in fact the widest, and it's a little fine even for me. I like a nice bold in-your-face line, which is why I usually write with an italic nib anyhow. Available sizes are medium, fine, and extra fine. I would probably find the latter two nigh unusable.

The Curidas is not an expensive pen, at least compared to its other name brand retractable brethren. You can score one for a little over $40 from all the usual suspects. Compare to $160-ish for a Vanishing Point or over $300 for a Dialog and you can see how having a humdrum nib on it can be excused.

Thing the third.

Look, fancy inks are problematic for me. I almost exclusively use my writing tools in a professional environment, so I can't deviate too far from somber and stolid blacks, blues, and just barely maybe some greens. I got this Diamine Blue Lightning shimmer ink in the mail the other day and this is really about as far as I can go in the vibrancy department.

I like this stuff in theory, even though I've only been using it for a single day so far. Out of the Curidas and its little nib the effect is really more sparkly than "shimmer," but maybe it'll do better once I put some of it into one of my calligraphy pens.

Thing the fourth is today's Bonus Ballpoint, which is an OLight O'Pen Mini. This is a compact bolt action ballpoint writer with an aluminum body, here in anodized forest green. This is aimed squarely at the EDC crowd. It's pleasing to fiddle with, a diminutive 3-1/4" long, and if you hand it to a member of the unwashed masses they're unlikely to manage to fuck it up.

At work I always have two pens. I keep a ballpoint or rollerball or something handy because you should never, ever hand one of your fountain pens to a client, stranger, or layman because they're likely to do something to it you'd rather they didn't.

Look at it! Behold the butyl overmold on the comically oversized cap! See the screen printed lines like a 90s basketball sneaker! Feel the forced ergonomics of the weird section! Examine the submarine portholes of an ink view window!

…It actually writes okay though. Rotring made good nibs.

Spring is here, the air is clear, and the boid is on the wing. So here's a pen that's cheap and absoid, a pastel plastic thing.

It is the first warm spring day of the season, so on a lark (ha) I grabbed this out of the Pen Bucket. These don't even get a slot in my pen holder. I bought this as a pack of I believe eight at Five Below for $5. They came in all different pastel colors, but among them this green one is the superior choice. Each was included with a cartridge of different colored inks roughly matching the color of the pen bodies, which is watery and very transparent, and comes in a cartridge style I don't recognize:

As before these are all taken in my office at work which has terrible lighting for photography. Sorry about that.

The exposure didn't do it justice, but the ink this came with is a very transparent, very light sort of plastic-easter-grass green.

All eight or however many came in the pack have these same unremarkable steel nibs which, if we're keeping score, would probably be called a "medium." They're not terribly nice, but they do write albeit with some skipping if you're fast and not careful (visible in my headline picture). Neither the pen, nor the nibs, nor even the packaging bore any kind of brand name or maker's mark aside from "manufactured for Five Below." It did not go as far as to specify by who. We'll probably never know.

The bodies are all injection molded and if I had to guess I'd say they're ABS plastic, complete the world's most Fisher-Price cap and pocket clip. The clip is molded in, not terribly well designed, nor is it removable. When it breaks, that'll be it. The knurled part on the end looks like it should unscrew but it doesn't. Curiously, the cap does not have an anti-choke hole. But the pen body does. (Obviously putting an anti-choke hole in the cap of a fountain pen would be a dumb idea, but that hasn't stopped manufacturers of cheap and nasty examples from doing so anyway either via the old monkey-see/do or possibly out of an overabundance of caution, and with predictable results.)

But as the refrain goes -- whaddaya want for 63 cents each?

Bottom of the barrel: Scraped!

• FWP Grand Central Skies / Safari M
• Iroshizuku Suo-Ro / Sport B
• Diamine Havasu Turquoise / Safari F
• Diamine Apple Glory / Safari M
• "Just Blue" / Lilliput F

Love the way GCS shimmers.

A CCR quote, and a few words of a certain classic twenty-five minute Arlo Guthrie song.

This isn't "proper" alt text, but the quotes at the bottom got a bit illegible as I ran out room, so...

20204.03.13.08.39 Clariefontaine A5

• Diamine Violet / Sailor 21
• Diamine Sherwood Green / Sport F
• FWP Pink Sugar Beach / Preppy 05 M
• Diamine Earl Grey / Perkeo M
• Iroshizuku sui-gyoku / Perkeo M
• Diamine Pumpkin / Perkeo M

Bother me tomorrow, today I'll buy no sorrows... - CCR [Above is in my atrocious cursive, just to see if I can even still write a simple sentence in it]

All those people, all those lives, where are they now? With loves, and hates, and passions just like mine, they were born and then they lived and then they died And then ~~they~~ I also ran out of room on the page, it continues "Seems so unfair, I want to cry." (The Smiths)

That's it for today, I suspect I'm a little behind on reading comments, hopefully will have some time today to remedy that.

The pen was a gift. I already have a charcoal Safari, a gray Al-Star, and another demonstrator, so I thought I’d try something different with this one. The nib was yanked from a $4 Lamy Joy knockoff on Amazon, but it fit perfectly and writes very well. Inked it up with a twenty year old bottle of Pelikan brown. Keep small bottles sealed, and honestly there’s not chance for evaporation or mold.

I'm in an oddball mood this morning, so the quote is from Simon and Garfunkel's "America". The original is "Kathy," the spelling liberty just fit my mood. Same for the mixed styles and colors in the text.

• Diamine Pink Ice / Preppy 05M
• Diamine Tropical Glory / Preppy 03F
• Diamine Apple Glory / Safari M
• Iroshizuku Shin-Ryoku / Perkeo M

Clairefontaine Triomphe 90gsm lined stationery, which also happens to be stationary within a generic six-ring binder from Amazon that I stripped the cover off, and rigged to a much more solid piece of cardboard cut down to A5-ish.

Slides really nicely that way right into a Travelers Notebook, the original cover was clear flexy plastic and kinda worthless as an insert.

Quickie ink samples are on Midori in A6, weight unknown. It plays pretty well with a lot of things, I thought I'd dig the color, but... Not so much.

Keeb in the background is generic Chinese 80-key from Amazon, to replace the one that was on sale because it was UK layout and my dumb ass didn't notice. Juuuuuuust different enough to be infuriating when I'm trying to work...

Gotta say, y'all, I enjoy this hobby on a relatively solitary basis, but... I'm having a friggin' blast doing these - not just because I'm rediscovering stuff I adore that's been buried too long in my ink drawer, but the sharing as well.

PS my penmanship is almost as potato as my photography skills. But I'm kinda stuck with both skills sucking, at this age. Meh, I still have fun.

Figured I would dust off one of my Vacumatic pens today so I could share a pic. It's got a gold EF nib and is currently inked with Quink Black. The color is "Golden Pearl," my favorite of the stacked celluloid color options. It's date code is "7" which could mean '37 or '47.

These pens are mesmerizing in person when you rotate them in nice lighting.

As ever, y'all, forgive the potato-quality image.

Today's contestants...

• Amo-Iro / Sport EF
• Hana-Ikada / Jinhao (model unknown) EF
• Syo-Ro / Sport B
• Grand Central Skies / Safari M

The shimmer in GCS doesn't photograph as well as I'd like, but there is some serious depth to that ink as with most FWP products.

Also, confession time... But just between the lot of us, of course... I may be a 45 year old man, but dammit, Hana-Ikada is one of my all time favorite colors. Can't even tell you why, but it brings a smile to my face to use, and it's just SO well behaved and clean to write with...

Second and third faves, while I'm confessing such things, are FWP Pink Sugar Beach and Diamine Pink Ice. Slightly less well behaved, but only just, and who doesn't love pink sparkly... Um... Yeah I'm not helping my case here lol!

Have a bottle of both, barely opened, and zero chance I’ll ever use either.

Without getting into the why…. 2 nearly full bottles of noodlers inks free to good home. Cover actual ship cost and they’re yours.

Really, truly, I want the damn things outta my ink drawer because I won’t ever use ‘em and because reasons.

Hell, if you’re somewhere between roughly Chambana, IL and Indianapolis, I might even be up to meet you somewhere.

Since my handwriting is a dog’s breakfast…

“Today’s fun

Going out for a bit so keeping it light. Just my much adored Fuyu-Gaki (you’ve seen that EF nib) and “mooring on the quinuai river,” from a Chinese company whose name I can’t recall, in a preppy 05M. Don’t know if the shimmer will photograph well.”

Still up for sample trades, can never have too many inks!

I think this is now officially a Thing we are doing.

This is just an off-the-cuff phone picture on my desktop at work; you all aren't getting my usual hyperartificial backgroundless studio object shots... yet.

I've been on a Parallel kick lately, in case you couldn't tell from my last and so far only post here. And the other day I learned that in the years since I assembled my complete collection of Parallel sizes, Pilot came out with two more. So my collection has been rendered incomplete. Without my input. Obviously, this cannot stand.

So just yesterday my 3.0mm variant arrived in the mail (and the 4.5 is still on the way).

The two new sizes are intermediates that go in between existing ones. The size I use the most is the smallest 1.5mm which is closest to the usual italic nibs I prefer to write with and is probably the least obnoxious to use for the written word you're going to hand to anyone else, or have to fit on a normal form or piece of paper.

The Parallels are excellent calligraphy tools but they're not exactly general purpose writers. They produce extremely sharp, consistent, bold, and thick lines with a lot of ink output (so don't use one on super absorbent paper unless you want your lettering to go all fuzzy) but you have to hold the nib very flat and accurately against the paper as there is no bevel or ball on the tip like a traditional fountain pen. You get used to it after a while.

The sizes are, in case anyone is curious:

• 1.5mm
• 2.4mm
• 3.0mm <- You Are Here (new)
• 3.8mm
• 4.5mm (new)
• 6.0mm

The 4.5mm to go in between the 3.8 and 6.0 fills a definite gap that used to be there and might have some purpose for people doing actual serious artwork with these things. The 3.0 I'm less sold on, since it's not a big jump up or down from there to the previously existing widths, but the thing is white with a cupcake frosting pink cap and feed block which surely has to count for something.

So today I brought it to work and anyone who asks me to write anything down is going to get it back in ridiculous gothic blackletter. That's a hardship they're just going to have to endure, isn't it.

On the off chance some turkey gives me a form with a carbon-not-carbon write through on it, I also have my Pilot Limited G2 in silver:

I'm not a fan of most ballpoints, but I'll put up with a decent gel or rollerball. I'll bet you didn't know Pilot made a metal bodied variant of the ubiquitous G2. Well, they do. Here it is.

• Jade Green
• Hope Pink
• Havasu Turquoise
• Hotaru Bi

Possible that I've posted this here before, but since views seem to be trending upwards and it also might have been on the other instance that's gone now...

...I positively love these pens, but is there any practical way to disassemble them, or am I stuck with the ink color I chose for them?

Maybe - just maybe - I'm a bit early but there's a chance my morning will be a lil nuts so might as well set things out and post ahead of time.

Also, feedback welcome - don't want to spam the sub, do want to add some useful content even if it's just a post history with a bunch of ink samples in it so some lunatic (like me) can agonize over the perfect orange between FG and Pumpkin (Protip, Iroshizuku every. single. time. It just writes better, across more pens, IMHO. It's also a slightly more pricey addiction than Diamine, so...)

Today's fun includes:

• Fuyu-Gaki in Safari EF

• Midway the Magnificent in a Perkeo M

• Pumpkin in another of the ever-present Perkeo M

• Amo-Iro in Sport EF

Pardon my handwriting, and weird datetime formatting. Blame my journaling habit for the latter, as it makes finding things I know I 100% wrote down rather easier. The former is all me.

Midori A6 for the scribbles, Clairefontaine in the background.

Being the change I want to see (more traffic and more interesting pens here)...

My primary pens for today are a Safari F inked with Tsutsuji, and a Kaweco Lilliput in brass, with the Kaweco Blue cartridge it came with (also F). I'll refill it with something more interesting when the time comes, just haven't decided what.

On an average day, I might rotate through two pens; or everything I have inked. Just depends on my mood.

Edit: That's Midori A6 they're sitting on / scribbled on, and Clairefontaine A5 in the background.

So I've been looking for a new pen and I've layed my eyes on this model and now I want it. The problem is that I can't find it in European stores. I know it's a limited edition but recently I found it on jetpens, they did an edition for North America. On jetpens the pen costs 30 but with shipping and taxes it gets to 50€ so not really convenient.

Is there a cheaper way of ordering this pen? Could I order from an Asian shop?

I was looking into it after I posted a question earlier, and found this very thorough description of the Platinum Preppy line of products. Much better presentation compared to the Platinum website or the Platinum US distributor website (which has information about a different product line on the preppy page).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12701634

https://www.printables.com/model/791788-pilot-parallel-cap-with-pocket-clip

I just got done solving my years-long festering irritation with my spread of Pilot Parallel fountain pens, which come with a caps that ain't got pocket clips. Among other flaws. They bloody well have clips on 'em now.

I've never owned or used a fountain pen before, but I saw that these are less than $6 a piece and refill cartridges look pretty cheap too.

Are these worth buying for a first timer or are they an invitation to a souring experience for a noob?

Found this bottle of Sheaffer Skrip Ink Jet Black ink in the house. It's probably 20+ years old but no clue from what time exactly.

Has a thin metal cap, it's all crusty on the threads.

The inside has an ink well made from glass.

This is the angriest ink I have ever seen. Following two pictures are done on Claire Fontaine paper. Usually you can leave whole pools of ink to dry on it without it getting through the surface. But this ink burned right through! back:

Small writing test. The ink is so fluid that it overfills the feed. If I don't absorb the excess with tissue every 20 seconds whole droplets will spill onto the paper. I don't know if it was always like this or if it's because it has been sitting there for decades.

Small drawing test. The ink is feathering which other inks usually doesn't do on this sketchbook.

Washing nib in water reveals red undertones. Could also be seen in the bottle images.

Pen used for testing: FPR Indus with ultra flex nib.

What's your favourite that you want to share? Let's hear them!

My absolute favourite hack is for people who don't own brass shims to floss a nib that has collected a lot of paper fibre. If you get mail with a plastic window, you can carefully trim a strip long enough that you can hold between your fingers so there is tension. This is often enough to floss a tine.

If you're an occasional sample user that tends to forget about using them, have a nice eyedropper in the collection. I'm not a huge samples owner and a little forgetful, I found my samples started evaporating before I finished them. Things changed when I got an Opus 88 Demonstrator. Now when I get a sample from a local swap meet, I can drop 3.56ml into the tank, so often that's an entire sample.

I have a Hongdian Black Forest EF and I love the EF nib in particular. I find the Black Forest a little too slender in my hand to be comfortable for long writing sessions, so I’m wondering what other Hongdian pens (with an EF nib) people would recommend I try?

I figure we need something to get the conversation going.

We hear a lot about popular inks like Iroshizuku Kon-Peki, Noodler's Black, and Waterman Serenity Blue all the time. Let's start talking some inks that sadly don't get as much attention as they actually deserve.

What's your favourite underrated ink?

I think workhorse type inks are some of my favourite underrated inks. Aurora Black doesn't get as much love as it actually deserves. It's a great workhorse ink. Nothing really fancy, but it just works. I like Pelikan 4001 Royal Blue way more than I thought I would. It's very dry and does a great job of controlling some of the firehose pens in my collection.